What are the “Foundations of Christian Art?”
The Foundations of Christian Art: Illustrated takes the reader on a pilgrimage through the history of Christian art, focusing especially upon its architecture, iconography, illumination, and the arts and crafts guilds, but always returning to the fundamental genius of Christianity, which gave meaning to the art.
“Titus Burckhardt is an exponent of the permanent, the timeless; a domain which makes the use of the word ‘historian’ redundant in a modern context. Burckhardt has done more than any other single author in the past 50, if not 100, years to recover the essential principles of the purpose of the arts—that is, if you accept the premise that the arts are more than mere hedonism and ‘individual expression’…Due to his intrinsically spiritual nature, Burckhardt has revealed insight after insight into Christian symbolism and craft practice.”
—Keith Critchlow
What is sacred Christian art?
“An art cannot properly be called ‘sacred’ solely on the grounds that its subjects originate in a spiritual truth; its formal language also must bear witness to a similar origin. Such is by no means the case with a religious art like that of the Renaissance or of the Baroque period, which is in no way distinct, so far as style is concerned, from the fundamentally profane art of that era; neither the subjects which it borrows, in a wholly exterior and as it were literary manner, from religion, nor the devotional feelings with which it is permeated in appropriate cases, nor even the nobility of soul which sometimes finds expression in it, suffice to confer on it a sacred character. No art merits that epithet unless its forms themselves reflect the spiritual vision characteristic of a particular religion.”
“In Christianity the divine image par excellence is the human form of the Christ; thus it comes about that Christian art has but one purpose: the transfiguration of man, and of the world which depends on man, by their participation in the Christ.”
What is the role of the illuminated manuscript in Christian art?
“Because (illuminated manuscripts) could be taken from place to place, more so almost than any other kind of work of art, it served as a model for artistic creation, especially in areas where indigenous artists had not hitherto been able to see the like. Frequently miniatures from a manuscript served as models for a cycle of wall-paintings or even sculptures in relief. If the book came from a distant land, or if it was the work of the founder of a monastery, one saw in it the witness of tradition. Just as the text was given word for word, so the pictures belonging to it were carefully copied. In this way book illuminations can be traced like a silver thread running through the first millennium of Christian art.
“For us, surviving early medieval manuscripts are often the only reliable witnesses of whole epochs and of cultural regions from which other work has hardly been passed down to us at all, in an unchanged form.”
What are the foundations of Christian art?
“The art that springs from a genuinely Christian inspiration is derived from certain images of the Christ and of the Virgin that have a miraculous origin. The craft traditions continue alongside it, and they become Christian by adoption; they are none the less sacred in character, in the sense that their creative methods embody a primordial wisdom that responds spontaneously to the spiritual truths of Christianity. These two currents, the traditional art of icon painting and the craft traditions, together with certain liturgical music evolved from a Pythagorean inheritance, are the only elements in Christian civilization that deserve to be called ‘sacred art.'”
What is symbolic about the Christian temple?
“The Fathers of the Church say that the sacred building represents first and foremost the Christ as Divinity manifested on earth; at the same time it represents the universe built up of substances visible and invisible, and finally, man and his various ‘parts.’ According to some of the Fathers the holy of holies is an image of the Spirit, the nave is an image of reason, and the symbol of the altar summarizes both; according to others the holy of holies, that is to say the choir or the apse, represents the soul, while the nave is analogous to the body and the altar to the heart.”
“It is important not to lose sight of the fact that in the eyes of every artist or artisan taking part in the building of a church, the theory was visibly being made manifest by the building as a whole, reflecting as it did the cosmos or the Divine plan. Mastery therefore consisted in a conscious participation in the plan of the ‘Great Architect of the Universe.’ It is this plan that is revealed in the synthesis of all the proportions of the temple; it coordinates the aspirations of all who take part in the work of the cosmos.”
What are the purposes and forms of sacred art in the sanctuary?
“The sacred art of Christianity constitutes the normal setting of the liturgy, of which it is an amplification in the fields of sound and of sight. Like the non-sacramental liturgy, its purpose is to prepare and to bring out the effects of the means of grace instituted by Christ Himself…The liturgy does not determine the architectural order alone, it also regulates the disposition of sacred images according to the general symbolism of the regions of space and the liturgical significance of left and right.”
“There is also the fact that a ‘diaphanous’ architecture would not be possible without the art of the glazier, whose windows make the outer walls transparent while safeguarding the intimacy of the sanctuary. The light broken up by stained glass is no longer that of the crudity of the outer world, it is the light of hope and beatitude. At the same time the color of the glass has itself become light…so the Divine Light, which as such is blinding, is attenuated and becomes Grace when it is refracted in the soul.”
The original Mandilion “had been preserved at Constantinople until it disappeared when the town was pillaged by the Latin Crusaders.”
What is the tradition of the sacred image?
“The Word is not merely the pronouncement, at once eternal and temporal, of God, it is equally His image, as St. Paul said; that is to say, It reflects God on every level of manifestation. The sacred image of the Christ is thus only the final projection of the descent of the Divine Word to earth.”
“Among the prototypes generally handed down in Christian art, the most important is the acheiropoietos (‘not made by human hands’) image of Christ on the Mandilion. It is said that Christ gave His image, miraculously imprinted on a piece of fabric, to the messengers of the King of Edessa, Abgar, who had asked Him for His portrait…As for the usual traditional representations of the Christ, its authenticity is confirmed by a thousand years of Christian art, and this alone is a powerful argument of that authenticity, for, unless reality is denied to everything of that order, it must be admitted that the Spirit present in the tradition as a whole would soon have eliminated a false physical representation of the Savior.”
How does the icon function?
“The doctrinal foundation of the icon determines not only its general orientation, its subject and its iconography, but also its formal language, its style. This style is the direct result of the function of the symbol: the picture must not seek to replace the object depicted, which surpasses it eminently; according to the words of Dionysius the Areopagite it must ‘respect the distance that separates the intelligible from the sensible.'”
Where does the decadence in Christian art spring from?
“In art as in everything else, man finds himself faced by the following alternative: he must seek the Infinite in a relatively simple form, keeping within the limits of that form and working through its qualitative aspect, while sacrificing some possible developments, or he must seek the Infinite in the apparent richness of diversity and change, though it must lead in the end to dispersion and exhaustion. The economy of a traditional art can be more or less ample, it can be flexible or rigid; all depends on the power of spiritual assimilation inherent in a particular civilization, environment, or collective vocation.”
“At the time of the Renaissance, artistic geniuses suddenly sprang up almost everywhere, and with an overflowing vitality. The phenomenon is analogous to what happens in the soul of one who abandons a spiritual discipline. Psychic tendencies that have been kept in the background suddenly come to the fore, accompanied by a glittering riot of new sensations with the compulsive attraction of as yet unexpected possibilities…Renaissance and Baroque art had a scale of artistic and human values incomparably richer than anything that can be met with today.”
Can Christian art be reborn?
“The character of Christian painting is essentially, and not accidentally, figurative. This means that it can never dispense with the traditional prototypes that safeguard it from arbitrariness. These prototypes always leave a fairly wide margin for the exercise of creative genius, as well as for the special needs of times and places, in so far as these may be legitimate…The success of any such enterprise is dependent above all on intuitive wisdom; as for originality, charm, and freshness, these will come of their own accord.
“Christian art will not be reborn unless it completely frees itself from individualistic relativism, and returns to the sources of its inspiration, which by definition are situated in the ‘timeless.'”
