8.
Naturally, Christian art does not treat all of the themes that we should bear in mind for the health of our souls. There is no shortage of topics it ignores: the role of self-discipline, the need for playfulness, the importance of honouring the fragility of the natural world … But completeness isn’t the point. For our purposes, Christianity is more interested in defining an overarching mission for art: to depict virtues and vices and remind us of what is important though prone to be forgotten.
Intriguingly, Christianity never expected its artists to decide what their works would be about; it was left to theologians and doctors of divinity to formulate the important themes, which were only then passed on to painters and sculptors and turned into convincing aesthetic phenomena. The Church implicitly wondered why a mastery of the technical aspects of art — a talent for making a dab of paint look like an elbow, or a patch of stone like hair — should be thought to be compatible with the ability to work out the meaning of life. The religion did not, on top of everything else, expect that Titian could be a gifted philosopher. It may be that we are asking too much of our own secular artists, requiring them not only to impress our senses but also to be the originators of profound psychological and moral insights. Our artistic scene might benefit from greater collaborations between thinkers and makers of images, a marriage of the best ideas with their highest expressions.
Christianity suggests that we might stick to certain key themes and allow artists to achieve greatness principally through their interpretations. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Rest during the Flight to Egypt, 1750. (illustration credit 8.20)
Titian, The Flight into Egypt, c. 1504. (illustration credit 8.21)
Christianity was also wise in not insisting that the concepts behind works of art should change all the time. There have been few more harmful doctrines for art than the Romantic belief that greatness must involve constant originality at a thematic level. Christian artists were able amply to express their unique skills, but had to stick to a set roster of topics, from the Annunciation to the Deposition. Their individual inclinations were subsumed within an overarching brief which spared them the relentless Romantic pressure to be original.
To specify that images must focus on the same ideas is not to demand that they should all look identical. Just as Titian’s and Fragonard’s versions of the holy family’s Flight into Egypt look entirely different, so too a putative ‘Sorrows of Infidelity’ depicted by a contemporary photographer like Jeff Wall would not need to look anything like the same theme as handled by his colleagues Philip-Lorca diCorcia or Alec Soth.
9.
Although we have up to this point considered modern secular art only incidentally, and through the prism of photography, the model wherein art serves as a mechanism for reminding us of important ideas extends comfortably beyond the representational realm to include abstract works.
Though it can sometimes be hard to say quite what abstract pieces are about, we can sense their broad themes well enough and, when it is a question of great works, we welcome them into our lives for the same reasons as figurative images: because they put us back in touch with themes we need to keep close to us but are in danger of losing sight of. We sense virtues like courage and strength emanating from the stern steel slabs of Richard Serra. There are ever-necessary evocations of calm in the formal geometries of paintings by Agnes Martin, while poems on the role of tension in a good life lurk within the wood and string sculptures of Barbara Hepworth.
Buddhism has been provocative in suggesting that our response to abstract creations could be enhanced if we were given specific suggestions as to what we should be thinking about while we contemplate them. When faced with the complex patterns of mandalas, for instance, we are encouraged to narrow down their range of possible meanings and focus on them as sensuous representations of the harmony of the cosmos described in Buddhist theology. The religion additionally gives us mantras to repeat as we look, most often ‘Om mani padme hum’ (translated from the Sanskrit as ‘Generosity-ethics-patience-diligence-renunciation-wisdom’), which sets up a virtuous cycle whereby our eyes enrich our ideas while our ideas guide our vision.
What separates the work of a contemporary abstract artist like Richard Long (above) from the tradition of the Buddhist mandala (top) is that Long’s piece carries no liturgy, it does not tell us what we might think about as we look at it, and hence, regardless of its great formal beauty, it risks provoking reactions of bewilderment or tedium. Despite the powerful elite prejudice against guidance, works of art are not diminished by being accompanied by instruction manuals. (illustration credit 8.22)
Inspired by Buddhism’s heavy-handed and yet productive curatorial directions, we might ask of many works of art that they tell us more explicitly what important notions they are trying sensually to remind us of, so as to rescue us from the hesitation and puzzlement that they may otherwise provoke. Despite a powerful elite prejudice against guidance, works of art are rarely diminished by being accompanied by instruction manuals.
10.
Aside from directing us to rethink the themes and purpose of art, religions also ask us to reconsider the categories under which works are arranged. Modern museums typically lead us into galleries arranged under headings such as ‘The Nineteenth Century’ and ‘The Northern Italian School’, which reflect the academic traditions in which their curators have been educated. However, this arrangement is no more responsive to the inner needs of museum-goers than is — to readers — the scholarly division of literature into such categories as ‘The American Novel of the Nineteenth Century’ or ‘Carolingian Poetry’.
A more fertile indexing system would group together artworks from across genres and eras according to the concerns of our souls. Gallery tours would take us through spaces which would each try to remind us in a sensory way — with the help of unapologetic labels and catalogues — of important ideas related to a variety of problematic areas of our lives. There would be galleries devoted to evoking the beauty of simplicity (featuring works by Chardin and Choe Seok-Hwan), the curative powers of nature (Corot, Hobbema, Bierstadt, Yuan Jiang), the dignity of the outsider (Friedrich, Hopper, Starkey) or the comfort of maternal nurture (Hepworth, Cassatt). A walk through a museum would amount to a structured encounter with a few of the things which are easiest for us to forget and most essential and life-enhancing to remember.
In this revamping we might look for inspiration to the Venetian parish church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. Proudly indifferent to the indexing methodology of the academic system, the Frari is committed to the mission of rebalancing our souls with a highly eclectic range of works, including a fresco by Paolo Veneziano (c. 1339), a statue of John the Baptist by Donatello (1438), Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child with Saints (1488) and a large altarpiece by Titian (1516–18). The building throws together sculptures, paintings, metalwork and window traceries from across centuries and regions because it is more interested in the coherence of art’s impact on our souls than in the coherence of the origins and stylistic inclinations of the people who produced it.
By contrast, in terms of honouring the purpose of art, the apparent order of the modern museum is at heart a profound dis order. Scholastic traditions such as sorting works according to where or when they were created, grouping them by categories such as ‘School of Venice’ and ‘School of Rome’, or ‘landscapes’ and ‘portraits’, or separating them by genre — photography, sculpture, painting — prevent secular museums from achieving any real coherence at an emotional level, and therefore from laying claim to the true transformative power of the art arranged in churches and temples.