11.
The challenge is to rewrite the agendas for our museums so that art can begin to serve the needs of psychology as effectively as, for centuries, it has served those of theology. Curators should dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past. These curators should co-opt works of art to the direct task of helping us to live: to achieve self-knowledge, to remember forgiveness and love and to stay sensitive to the pains suffered by our ever troubled species and its urgently imperilled planet. Museums must be more than places for displaying beautiful objects. They should be places that use beautiful objects in order to try to make us good and wise. Only then will museums be able to claim that they have properly fulfilled the noble but still elusive ambition of becoming our new churches.
A new Tate Modern, London. If museums really were to be our new churches, the art wouldn’t need to change, only the way it was arranged and presented. Each gallery would focus on bringing a set of important, rebalancing emotions to life. (illustration credit 8.23)
IX
Architecture
1.
Given how ugly huge stretches of the modern world have become, one might wonder whether it really matters what things around us look like, whether the design of office towers, factories, depots and docks truly merits the consideration of anyone beyond those who directly own or use these structures. The implicit answer must be no. It is surely foolish, precious and ultimately dangerous to be overly receptive to whatever is in front of our eyes; otherwise, we would end up unhappy most of the time.
So far as the law is concerned, property development is just another branch of private enterprise. What counts is who owns a piece of land, not who is forced to stare at, and then suffer from, what has been built on it. The legal system is not geared to recognize the sensitivities of passers-by. To complain that a tower or motel offends the eye is not a category of distress that contemporary planners are skilful at honouring or addressing. In its tolerance of landscapes which generally leave us no option but to look at our feet, the modern world is resolutely, and in a secular sense, Protestant.
When Protestantism took hold in northern Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, it manifested an extreme hostility towards the visual arts, attacking Catholics for their complicated and richly decorated buildings. ‘For anyone to arrive at God the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher,’ insisted John Calvin, giving voice to the anti-aesthetic sentiment of many in the new denomination. What mattered to Protestants was the written word. This, rather than elaborate architecture, would be enough to lead us to God. Devotion could be fostered by a Bible in a bare room just as well as it could in the nave of a jewel-encrusted cathedral. Indeed, there was a risk that through their sensory richness, sumptuous buildings could distract us, making us prefer beauty over holiness. It was no coincidence that Protestant reformers presided over repeated incidents of aesthetic desecration, during which statues were smashed, paintings burnt and alabaster angels brutally separated from their wings.
(illustration credit 9.1)
Relief statues in the Cathedral of St Martin, Utrecht, attacked during campaigns of Reformation iconoclasm in the sixteenth century. (illustration credit 9.2)
These same reformers meanwhile constrained their own architects to the design of sober and plain hangars which could shelter the members of a congregation from the rain while they read the Bible, but would leave them undistracted by any thoughts of the building they were in.
It was not long before Catholicism was goaded into a response. Following the Council of Trent in 1563, the papacy issued a decree insisting that, contrary to the impious suggestions of the Protestants, cathedrals, sculptures and paintings were in fact integral to the task of ensuring that ‘the people could be instructed and confirmed in the habit of remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith’. Far from being a diversion, sacred architecture was a reminder of the sacramental truths: it was a devotional poem written in stone, wood and fragments of coloured glass. To drive home the argument, the Catholic Church inaugurated a massive programme of construction and decoration. Alongside the pale, featureless halls of the Reformation, there now arose a new generation of ecclesiastical buildings intended to breathe passionate emotion back into a threatened faith. Ceilings were overlaid with images of heaven, niches were crowded with saints and walls were affixed with heavy stucco mouldings, above frescoes depicting miraculous incidents in Jesus’s ministry.
Left: Chapel at Schloss Hartenfels, Torgau, Germany, 1544. Right: Chiesa del Gesù, Rome, 1584. (illustration credit 9.3)
To derive a sense of the aesthetic gulf that had opened up between the two branches of Christianity, we need only compare the sobriety of the earliest extant Protestant chapel, at Schloss Hartenfels, in Torgau, Germany (1544), with the ecstasies of the nave vault (‘the triumph of the name of Jesus’) of Rome’s Chiesa del Gesù (1584).
2.
In arguing for the importance of architecture, Catholicism was making a point, half touching, half alarming, about the way we function. It was suggesting that we suffer from a heightened sensitivity to what is around us, that we will notice and be affected by everything our eyes light upon, a vulnerability to which Protestantism has frequently preferred to remain blind or indifferent. Catholicism was making the remarkable allegation that we need to have good architecture around us in order to grow into, and remain, good people.
The foundations of Catholicism’s respect for beauty can be traced back to the work of the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, who in the third century AD made an explicit connection between beauty and goodness. For Plotinus, the quality of our surroundings counts because what is beautiful is far from being idly, immorally or self-indulgently ‘attractive’. Beauty alludes to, and can remind us about, virtues like love, trust, intelligence, kindness and justice; it is a material version of goodness. If we study beautiful flowers, columns or chairs, Plotinus’s philosophy proposed, we will detect in them properties that carry direct analogies with moral qualities and will serve to reinforce these in our hearts via our eyes.
Along the way, Plotinus’s argument served to emphasize how seriously one would have to consider ugliness. Far from being merely unfortunate, ugliness was recategorized as a subset of evil. Ugly buildings were shown to contain equivalents of the very flaws that revolt us at an ethical level. No less than people, ugly buildings can be described using terms like brutal, cynical, self-satisfied or sentimental. Furthermore, we are no less vulnerable to their suggestions than we are to the behaviour of ill-intentioned acquaintances. Both give licence to our most sinister sides; both can subtly encourage us to be bad.
Not coincidentally, surely, it was the Protestant countries in Europe which first witnessed the extremes of ugliness that would become so typical of the modern world. Manchester, Leeds and other cities like them subjected their inhabitants to hitherto unparalleled degrees of unsightliness, as if they were testing to the full John Calvin’s contention that architecture and art have no role to play in the condition of our souls and that a godly life can therefore satisfactorily unfold in a slum tenement with a view on to an open-cast coal mine, just so long as there is a Bible to hand.