Читать книгу The World's Debt to the Catholic Church - James J. Walsh - Страница 6

Table of Contents

According to a very old tradition, St. Luke, who wrote the third Gospel, was a painter and a physician. In the last generation the authenticity of the tradition of St. Luke's having been a physician was very seriously doubted and indeed it was thought for a time that the Higher Criticism had completely contradicted the idea. Harnack, however, following Ramsay, has written very positively with regard to Luke during the present century, emphasizing the fact that he was beyond all doubt a physician, and now the idea that he was also a painter seems to be confirmed by historical researches. Certainly his Gospel is full of scenes and events that are word pictures of the most complete and beautiful description. His second chapter has furnished artists almost innumerable with ideas for pictures of the Annunciation that have made a wonderful chapter in art history. Such stories as the raising to life of the son of the widow of Nain or of the raising of Lazarus from the dead could only have been done by a man of artistic eye and spirit, and one can scarcely think of their emanating from one who had not done some painting. It is Luke above all who has given us striking detailed pictures of the miracles of the Lord and it must not be forgotten that, as Harnack and Ramsay point out, he has taken the stories told by the other evangelists and has put them in medical terms so as to give exactly the diagnosis and therefore makes the miraculous cures all the more certain. These miracles particularly have supplied subjects for Christian artists ever since. Every story in Luke's Gospel is a picture in simple beautiful words inviting its reproduction with the brush.

Under the circumstances it is not surprising that from the very beginning painting has been used by the Church for the decoration of ecclesiastical buildings of all kinds in order to attract and hold the attention and arouse the religious emotions. Excavation of the catacombs has revealed, during the past generation particularly, a whole series of paintings which indicate very clearly that the symbolism of the Church in art dates from the first and second century. Pictures of the Lord Himself, of the Lamb, of the Crucifixion, and of the Apostles, come from the very earliest Christian time. The fact that in the ruins of the palace of the emperors on the Palatine Hill there was found, sketched rudely on the wall with a stylus or nail, a caricature of the Crucifixion in the shape of an ass nailed to a cross, is of itself a definite indication that the Christians must have been using very commonly a figure of the Crucified One as the most striking symbol of their religion. This early art is primitive, and yet it has a spirit and a vigor and vividness that give it a place in the history of art and that set it above ever so much of modern art that represents merely a copy of what someone else has done, with but very little, if any, meaning for the artist himself.

This is what has characterized Christian art all down the ages. The artist had his heart in the work, saw things for himself and expressed them with an ardent individuality that makes for true art. When the Church came out from the Catacombs the walls of the basilicas afforded abundant opportunity for decoration, and painters availed themselves of it very well. There may still be seen on the walls of San Lorenzo in Rome and of St. Paul's without the walls, exemplifications of the artistic work of this kind that was employed. The original paintings have themselves long faded or been destroyed by the vicissitudes of fire and water and the crumbling hand of time, but the renewal of them only served to emphasize the fact that painting had been looked upon as a valuable handmaid of the Church from very early times. Indeed not a few of the early heresies were founded on the refusal of some people to think that art ought to be used this way in the service of the Creator, for they feared that it would lead to idolatry. It is surprising how often it happens that people themselves who have no sense of art fail entirely to understand the fine effect that art has on others and how the emotions it produces can be used to lift up the heart and mind for the highest purposes of worship. In the modern time we have found that the Quakers, who count it a fault in men to dress in anything but simple gray or to use decorations of any kind in their meeting houses, are in very large proportion color blind and therefore fail entirely to understand the extremely interesting effect produced on those possessed of color vision by the colorful beauties of the world around them.

The first great period of artistic decoration of churches was characterized by mosaics which had all the attraction of color and the enduring quality of resistant substances. These mosaics have come down to us in all the beauty of the original quite unfaded. The mosaics in St. Mark's, nearly a thousand years old, are almost the same as up at Ravenna where they are a thousand five hundred years old and are still beautiful. It has often been said that these Byzantine decorations were stiff and formal, but it is marvelous how decorative they were. In recent years, when the decorative sense has come back to us once again we have learned to esteem ever so much more the solid colors and the straight lines of these Byzantine decorators. Occasionally they combined raised work with plane and this was deprecated by the critics of a generation ago, but Sargent in the Boston Public Library has come back to this mingling of the low relief plastic and the smooth colored surface with marvelous effectiveness. These old artists were right and the modern critics were wrong, and it is only because our artists had not had enough experience in doing this kind of work under the inspiration of religious motives and the patronage of churchmen, who were willing to spend money freely to secure decorative effects, that the mistake was possible.

It was not until after the Byzantine period that the supreme efflorescence of art took place. Cimabue was the first to depart from Byzantine formalism and to paint pictures that were not part of the decorative scheme but were just human beings as he saw them. His motifs were always taken from religious subjects. There has been some confusion as to whether Duccio did not paint some of the pictures that have been attributed to Cimabue and the two are now rivals in prestige, but both of them painted great religious art. It is the custom to speak of these artists as primitive, and to many people the word primitive means crude or even lacking in true artistic power, but almost needless to say, that is not the way that great critics have characterized the art of these men. Of the Madonna of the Ruccellai Chapel attributed to Cimabue and later to Duccio, W. J. Stillman, writing on Italian artists in The Century, said, "Like all the work of its time it has a pathos which neither the greater power of modern art nor the enervate elaborateness of modern purism can ever attain. Something in it by an inexplicable magnetism tells of the profound devotion, the unhesitating worship of the religious painter of that day; of faith and prayer, devotion and worship, forever gone out of art."

The old tradition is that when this picture was carried through the streets of Florence word had gone abroad that one of their artists had painted a marvelous picture of a Mother and Child so true to nature that it would seem almost as if they could speak. So the Florentines gathered on the streets to see it during its transport from studio to chapel and they were so taken up with it and they crowded around it so much that business was stopped for the afternoon. And then when the transfer had been completed and they had gazed at the Madonna and Child where it still hangs in the chapel of Santa Maria Novella, where Dante saw it and "it is still one of the chief objects of pilgrimage, of lovers of art who go to Italy," (Stillman) they were so proud of it, so touched by it, so carried away by this new spirit that had entered into the art of their time that they made the day a holiday and kept it so gloriously that that quarter of the city in which the picture had been painted was ever afterwards called Borgo Allegro, the Joyful Quarter of the city. Think for a moment of what would stop business in one of our modern cities in that same way. It would surely not be a picture and above all not a picture of a Mother and Child and surely not a religious picture. I have been told when I asked the question, a heavyweight champion coming in to town or the Giants after winning a new pennant might have such an effect, for now the multitude thinks in terms of the body rather than of the mind and the soul.

And then came Giotto, that marvel among painters. Is there anyone who thinks of Giotto as a primitive? Well, it was Giotto and Giotto's masters who were the only ones who deeply influenced the greatest painter of our time, François Millet, painter of The Angelus. Giotto's religious pictures are among the most wonderful creations in the world. It was the very spirit of Catholic Christianity that animated him in the wonderful paintings which have been the delight and the admiration and the despair of modern painters. Our own great artist Timothy Cole, sketching for his series of reproductions in wood-cut that were the delight of the past generation in The Century, said, "I am here in the Arena Chapel, and am at last confronted by Giotto. How brilliant, light and rich the coloring is! It quite fulfills all that I had read or thought of Giotto. I am conveniently located and the light is good, but it is hard to keep at work with so many fine things above one's head. I can scarcely escape the feeling that the heavens are open above me, and yet I must keep my head bent downward to the earth. Surely no one ever had a more inspiring workshop."

But I would have to make this chapter a catalog of painters' names if I were to try to enumerate all those who in Italy alone, inspired by religious reverence and awe, pictured to themselves the doctrines and the mysteries of their religion and then reproduced them on canvas. I remember once wandering around Florence with a man who had no religion and to whom much that he saw was absolutely novel, for he was following the guide books and seeing the churches and the picture galleries. He was lighting candles everywhere and he was taking great interest in Madonnas. At the end of two days he said that he thought he must have seen thousands of Madonnas already and he wondered if there were any more. Of course there were ever so many more to see and when I told him that every other city in Italy was like Florence in proportion to its population in the possession of pictures of the Madonna he could scarcely understand what it was all about. When he learned that these pictures, in spite of their abundance, were considered extremely valuable and that many of them would easily command if they were for sale not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of dollars he began to have some faint inkling of what wonderful things these old painters had done. And yet there are scores of subjects besides the Madonna, all of them inspired by Christian doctrine and belief and all of them capable of arousing the creative spirit of the artist as no other motif in the world can do it. For religion is the very soul of great art, a fount of inspiration for great artists who believe.

Besides Cimabue, Duccio and Giotto in the later Middle Ages there were Taddeo Gaddi and Orcagna and Fra Angelico, Fra Bartolomeo, Fra Lippo Lippi and Benozzo Gozzoli and Gentile da Fabriano, Andrea del Sarto and ever so many others. Modern artists know their value, some of them are highly praised by such men as Raphael and Michelangelo, who were their pupils--men like Perugino, Penturicchio, Signorelli, all of them did wonderful work in religious painting.

And then came the Renaissance with the three supreme artists, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Of Raphael a great French artist once said, "Two men seem to have had a glimpse into heaven, so marvelously do they paint the inhabitants of heaven. One of these is Raphael the Italian, the other Murillo the Spaniard, and of these two by far the greater is Raphael." Many who have a right to an opinion do not hesitate to declare that he was the greatest artist who ever lived. Certainly no one has painted what is so close to the human heart as he. One bit of evidence for that is the fact that copies of his works are found more widely distributed than those of any other artist of all time. There is scarcely a hamlet of one hundred inhabitants that has not in it, if it has books or pictures at all, a copy of Raphael's Sistine Madonna. See the original at Dresden and then you can appreciate the reason. It is placed in a room by itself because interest in it would kill any other picture placed near it. People enter on tiptoe, speak in whispers as if they were in the presence of a personage and not a picture, and usually back out of the room reverentially with face to the picture.

One of Raphael's major pictures, though not a large one, the Cowper Madonna, changed hands a few years ago and the price paid for it was $725,000.00. The canvas is only seventeen by twenty-four and it is marvelous to think that a man of about thirty should take a piece of canvas of this size and by spreading a little paint over it make it worth this amount of money four hundred years after it was originally done. And these pictures were hung in the churches in suitable environment and produced their effect in the silent hours of recollection and devotion. They were not meant to be hung, as unfortunately we hang them, in the glare and the bustle of a modern museum with distracting pictures all around them and constant movement near them, and yet in spite of all this handicap we appreciate something of their wonderful beauty. Leonardo da Vinci painted Madonnas almost equal to the greatest of Raphael's and some of them better than many of those that Raphael painted. And Michaelangelo painted Madonnas and painted many other religious subjects, and achieved veritable triumphs of art. All three of them are among the greatest geniuses the world has ever known. Men of wonderful versatility. Raphael was much more than a painter, he was an architect and an archeologist. Leonardo was one of the greatest engineers that ever lived and yet left in his will a legacy for candles to be burned at the shrine of the Blessed Virgin where he prayed as a boy, and Michelangelo did everything well, painting, sculpture and architecture and poetry. He has written sonnets that are equalled only by Dante and Shakespeare and have never been excelled by anyone. And one of those sonnets is to his Crucified God and in it he asks pardon of Him if at any time he should have employed his great talents, of which he could not help but be aware, for his own glory and not for the glory of God from whom he received them. When we look around us in our time and see the little whippersnappers who do trivial things in art or in science and how conceited they are about them and how they lay the flattering unction to their souls that they must be wonderful fellows and then think of Michelangelo in reverent spirit asking pardon of his God for anything like conceit, we appreciate what the spirit of religion is and we feel that it is no wonder that it enables men to achieve or at least arouses, incites, stimulates them to accomplish so much.

But to delay among the Italians would take a volume. Think of having to leave them without mentioning Botticelli and his great Magnificat, or Correggio and the picture of the Holy Night, or Fra Angelico and his angels, or Titian's glorious Madonnas; but if we cross Europe over to Spain we find another series of supremely great artists doing work of the highest type and the most enduring significance under the spell of Catholic Christianity. There is Murillo, whom we have already mentioned and whose Madonnas are so charming, but whose pictures of Biblical scenes and their significance have meant so much and have always had such an attraction for men; and Velasquez, whose pictures of the Madonna are among his great works and who painted for the gloomy Philip II some noble pictures of the Passion and especially the Crucifixion; and then Ribera, whose greatest pictures are religious and El Greco whose canvases were for so long unappreciated but now are coming into their own of praise because men have come to understand them and who as a result is now looked upon as one of the artistic geniuses of the world. How much religion meant for these men in the exercise of their talents and what an opportunity was afforded them because churches and the rich and the monasteries and the nobility and the king demanded religious pictures and they were afforded the chance to paint them!

Over in the Low Countries it is the same story. The Van Eycks who invented oil painting did their greatest work on religious subjects. Still men go to see in the Cathedral at Ghent the wonderful work of these artistic geniuses now more than five hundred years old and yet marvelously preserved, beautiful in the brilliancy of color, still an object of devotion on the part of the people. All over the Netherlands it is the same thing. For two centuries men did wonderfully beautiful art in the service of the Church under the inspiration of their religious beliefs. Copies of these paintings are to be seen all over the world because they are so attractive in their simple humanity and yet there is something divine which shines out from them and draws the heart and produces emotion such as modern art fails to evoke.

The marvelously beautiful pictures painted in the Netherlands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were mainly of subjects inspired by abiding faith and Catholic Christianity. We are likely to think of Madonnas as Italian or Spanish in origin but some of the most beautiful pictures of Mary as the Mother of God were painted by the artists of the Netherlands. Some of Roger Vander Weyden's are extremely attractive but are excelled by those of Memmling whose exquisite pictures in the hospital of St. John at Bruges, done just about the time of the discovery of America in the generation before Luther's time, show clearly how deep was the devotion to the Blessed Virgin in the Teutonic countries. So far from being solitary examples, these are but two of many. Quentin Matsys and Dirk Bouts are other genius artists of this period who painted pictures of the life of the Lord in which His Mother was the centre of attention, and these pictures have continued to hold the admiration and reverence of people ever since. And then there was Albrecht Dürer, some of whose pictures of the Madonna are among the most charmingly human, with something of divine shining out of them, that have ever been painted. Even Holbein following the old tradition and with the old faith still in him painted a very beautiful picture of the Burgomaster Meier with his wife and children in prayer before the Blessed Virgin. Few pictures are more impressive than this.

Albrecht Dürer is a typical example of the inspiration that the Church proved to be to great painters before the unfortunate religious revolution in Germany spoken of as a reform. Trained under great masters in Germany itself but deeply influenced by Mantegna, living in Venice for some years he became a very great painter. He was an intensely practical genius, the inventor of etching and a marvelous designer of woodcuts. Practically all of his etchings and woodcuts represent religious themes. The Greater Passion and the Lesser Passion have fifty topics in all. His Apocalypse in sixteen subjects is a work of genius. His copper plates which now command high prices in the auction rooms are nearly always on religious subjects. The Little Passion, as it is called, is among the greatest of these. Such subjects as St. Jerome in his Study, Death and the Devil, are very well known. Among his paintings are the well known Adam and Eve in Florence, the Four Apostles in Nuremburg, the Adoration of the Trinity in Vienna. Like the other great Renaissance artists and especially the Italians he made important contributions to other subjects besides art and was an engineer as well as a wood engraver, etcher and painter. It is for men with a breadth of genius like this that religion means most as an incentive to great work.

A hundred years after Albrecht Dürer came Peter Paul Rubens, educated by the Jesuits, deeply influenced by the Italians, spending five years in Italy and a year in Spain where he came under the influence of Velasquez. He was a great collector of art, most of his collection being of religious subjects. A great many of his paintings are to be found in churches where they properly belong, for they are on deep religious themes. The titles of his chief works, "The Descent from the Cross," at Antwerp, which is undoubtedly a masterpiece, the "Elevation of the Cross" and "Fall of the Damned," which are to be seen in Munich, demonstrate very clearly how much religion meant as an inspiration and incentive for his greatest art. Rubens was in his day very probably the best known and most appreciated artist in Europe. Everywhere he was received with admiration and respect. He was invited to France to decorate the Luxemburg, was sent to Spain on a diplomatic mission, went to England and was given a degree by the university, and a commission to decorate Whitehall, yet without religion as an incentive it is hard to conceive of him rising to great heights as a painter.

With the disturbance of religion produced by the religious revolution of the sixteenth century came decadence in painting. This was noticed particularly in the Protestant countries, though the political dissensions consequent upon religious disaffection hurt art everywhere. It has often been said that in modern times it is the lack of the inspiration afforded by deep religious feeling that more than anything else has kept us from having great painters. Portrait painting seldom proves an incentive to great art and may serve from merely sordid motives to lower artistry. Historical painting has an appeal to the mind that may be an impulse to artistic achievement but can scarcely prove an inspiration to really great art. When personal patriotism serves to point the significance of historical scenes in the painter's native country there may be some hope of the creative expression of truth touched with emotion such as would constitute great art. But this combination of influence seldom obtains. Mythological subjects may catch the attention and may serve to stimulate the fancy but they do not touch the heart of either painter or beholder. Sentimental subjects are a pitfall to the painter as they have been to the poet and the litterateur. These two latter themes represent scarcely more than exercise in the technique of art but make no call upon the deeper feelings which must be aroused if great art is to be done.

Hence in our time we have conventional artists of excellence, often exquisite technicians in landscape art or in portrait painting, but we can scarcely expect to reach any great art in these modes. If we were to have a revival of religious feeling accompanied by the profound beliefs of the older times then once more we might look for supreme artistic achievement. We are paying a high price for our free thinking, as we call it, in religious matters in the exclusion of supreme spiritual motives and profound religious emotions that it brings with it. What Gerhard Hauptmann said of sculpture (see end of chapter on sculpture) might well be repeated here of painting.