Mccabe--2 of 5
THERE NEVER WAS A CATHOLIC ART
That, a Catholic reader would say, is such nonsense that it is impudent to ask people to read it. Better informed folk will say, with a smile, that it is an uncontrolled expression of my anti- Papal complex or at the best a paradox. Not a bit of it. It is a plain statement of fact, and my habitual readers will know that I have very closely studied the history of art, especially during the Middle Ages, and discussed it in earlier works. Let me first make a distinction which is elementary yet is quite commonly overlooked, and not infrequently by writers on art.
When you pass along the streets of a city you notice that, generally speaking, banks and insurance corporations have more artistic buildings than the others. Is there some artistic inspiration in the money-business, something that you would call financial art? You know the answer. They just employ art more than other concerns because it pays them to do this. Never mind for the moment what their conception of art is. It may be block glass and chromium steel or a gothic sky-scraper. The point is that the diverse artistic effort in a collection of buildings expresses the resources of the business and the particular utility it finds in the employment of art. Well, the richest employer of artists is and always's was the Catholic Church, and no other business in the world derives so much profit from the employment of art as it does. It no more inspires the art than a funeral-furnisher does. If there is anything in its doctrines that may in any sense be said to inspire art it is just in those bastard dogmas in which the original Christian ideas are mixed with Greek or Roman mythology or medieval barbarism.
The history of Catholic art, even as it is known to every educated man, confirms this, and the more closely you study it the clearer the truth becomes. There was no art in the service during the first three centuries. Naturally, says the apologist. The faithful were fugitives from the police, holding services that were necessarily simple in the catacombs. . . . Rubbish. There were only a few years out of the 250 (from Nero to Constantine) when they had to dip underground, They hated and feared art. It was what the devil employed to make paganism attractive to keep the Greeks and Romans out of the Church. What happened in the 4th Century, when the Roman Church got freedom and wealth, was not that it began to inspire an art but that it began to rob the pagans of their art, The official Book of the Popes, composed in Rome from the early Middle Ages onward, has preserved an extraordinary list of the artistic furniture (silver, altars, statues, etc.) that the Emperor Constantine lifted from the pagan temples of Rome and donated to the new Christian churches. And when, decade after decade, the Romans still clung to the old religion, the Christian leaders, who were now fully-pledged Fascists since they had taken over the axe and the rods, emptied the gods and goddesses, the holy water and incense, the vestments and ritual, from the temples into the Christian conventicles on the other side of the street and nailed up the doors of the temples.
The eastern Churches were still so rooted in the anti-artistic tradition that they generally preferred to burn the temples and all their artistic paraphernalia. Pagan temples were not meeting-houses in which folk sat or stood in rows with long faces chanting doggerel or listening to some professional teacher of virtue. They were art-museums. Those gay old stories of Zeus and Aphrodite, of Apollo and Athene, had in four or five centuries "inspired" a wonderful art. In a century or two sculpture, painting, and architecture had made more progress than the more ancient world had made in 3,000 years. And it was mostly stored in the temples for the people to admire and enjoy. From about 390 to 420 most of these went up in smoke. Priests and monks, with the new Fascist powers that the bishops had wheedled from the emperors, led mob's to the attack, and all over the Greek world there was such a holocaust of art as Goths and Vandals never perpetrated.
At least, the apologist might say, the Roman Church did better than the Greek. It preserved and Christianized the art. To what extent we need not inquire. The point here is that it did not inspire a new art but, in the words of one of the leading art- historians, Luebke, "put on the corporeal garment of ancient and decaying art." If you prefer me to quote a Catholic historian of art, Dr. F. Von Reber says in his History of Medieval Art (p. 73) that "the general debasement of art and the conceptions of Christianity worked together to destroy that perfection of outward appearance which is the vital principle of all art." In any case, the zeal for art, in the corrupt Roman Church of the 4th Century and Europe passed into the artistic hell of the Dark Age.
I have often illustrated the way in which the Black International has succeeded in recent years in poisoning the wells of public information by references to the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. The boast of British Catholics that they "revised" it is only too true. Amongst other changes notice that "Dark Ages," on which there had previously been no article, now bag a short notice from one of the professors of history of a second- rate British university. I suppose they had to pass over Oxford and Cambridge to find a man who could please Catholics. This man solemnly says, with all the superciliousness of his school that the phrase Dark Ages -- being a continuous period we ought to call the Dark Age -- used to be applied by writers who judged life by the classical standard of art and letters, to the period from the 5th to the 15th Century. He seems to be unaware that it was the Father of Catholic History, Cardinal Baronius, who first used the phrase; that, it does not simply designate the scarcity of art and letters but of all civilization; and that no responsible historian carries it as far as the 15th Century. It is, he says, now "obsolete"; whereas it is fully vindicated in the greatest historical work in the English language, the Cambridge Medieval History. The only sense in which it could now be used, he says, is that the period, has loft us only a very scanty and poor historical literature to inform us about it; and he does not reflect that this is precisely one of the symptoms of its degradation. But it is wrong to apply so opprobrious's a word to "one of the great constructive periods in human activity." This man is President of the British Royal Historical Society!
I must refer the interested reader to other works in which he can read about the total collapse of the fine Greek-Roman civilization and the five or six centuries of moral, social, legal, political, and economic, as well as cultural, debasement that followed. It is enough that art was dead, except amongst the anti- Papal Ostrogoths and Lombards of North Italy, until, in the 11th Century, Greek art was introduced into Germany by a royal marriage, and it was not until a century later that Europe generally began to cultivate art. Professor Stenton is right that this was "one of the great constructive periods in human activity." He merely forgot to add that this was wherever the Roman Church did not exercise power. Under the Moslem, from Spain to Eastern Persia, the earth shone with a brilliant art from the 8th Century onward.
But the great art of the Middle Ages! That is what the apologist and the artistic converts to the Church have in mind: the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, the superb paintings and statues, the work in gold, silver, and bronze, the tapestries and stained windows, the lace's and embroideries. Certainly a period of superb artistic creativeness, and because a half or more of the works of art then created are religious the apologists and the religious- minded artists clap their hands and cry: See what our religion inspired, see what the world has lost in discarding it!
I will not be tempted to reply that according to very many art-authorities of our time we, especially atheistic France, have created a greater art, because I must confess to an incurable enthusiasm for medieval cathedrals, paintings, and sculpture. But this art, is just as inspired in its "profane" as in its "Sacred" achievements: as great in its civic halls as in its cathedrals, in its painted Venuses and sinful princes as in its Madonnas and saints. And when you call the sacred part of it Catholic art, because it represents ideas or personalities of Catholic theologY, remember the elementary distinction between an art inspired by Catholicism and one merely employed by the Church. Nearly every modern historian of art or expert on the Renaissance has pointed out those facts. I have quoted a dozen of them in earlier works on the subject, of which a summary is given in Little Blue Book No. 1136, Medieval Art and the Church. Even Lord Leighton, the distinguished British painter and head of the Pre-Raphaelite School, says that during the early development of Italian painting the Church was a blight on the art and that it attained greatness only when the humanism of the Renaissance began to replace religion as its inspiration. (Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, 1896).
The Catholic artists and men and women of artistic sensitiveness but very little knowledge of the broad history of art or the lives and opinions of the great medieval artists feel that in this field the Church will find its most powerful argument. It is very little use asking them to study the leading modern authorities on the subject. They just kneel in rapture in a medieval cathedral or before a sacred painting, and because we no longer build such cathedral's or paint such pictures they say: Here is the glorious flower of the Catholic spirit. They would say just the same about a fresco by Pinturicchio (a skeptical, dissipated artist employed by one of the most flagrantly immoral of the Popes to paint his, the Pope's, mistress as the Virgin Mary) in the Vatican, or a painting by Paolo Veronese (who was dragged before the Inquisition for the irreverence of his art) or Filippo Lippi (a loose friar who seduced a nun and lived for years with her while he painted beautiful religious pictures). They would glow with fervor and pride before one of the great religious paintings of Rubens and then (I hope) blush with a sense of sin before the same artist's "Venus and Adonis," which is equally "inspired." They encourage the police to prevent the reproduction and sale today of the classical studies in which most of these great artists revelled, and then they have copies exhibited everywhere of the religious pictures which the rich churches and convents of Italy commissioned them to paint. The same bishop or cardinal would employ the same artist to paint a Leda and the Swan for his dining-room or library and a Holy Family for his chapel. The artist did equally fine work in both fields -- no expert has ever claimed that there is less "inspiration" in the profane than in the sacred work of Renaissance artists -- but the religious market was much the larger and richer.
The all-pervading fallacy of all this slush about Catholicism and Renaissance art is the supposition, which too many American historians now encourage, that the later Middle Age (say about 1150 to 1550) was a period of general piety and loyalty to the Church's commands. If that were so, the modern "psychological" historian would have a nice problem in explaining how that was just the period of the worst and most protracted degradation of the Papal Court, and why the one period of great art in Rome itself coincides with the most openly immoral and skeptical stretch of medieval Church history. Not only, all the leading authorities on the Renaissance (Burckhardt, Symonds, Hudson, and the Cambridge History) but the special Catholic authority on the period, Dr. Ludwig Pastor, make this quite clear. In respect of cruelty, dishonor, injustice to the weaker, and especially sexual freedom and sodomy, it was a more vicious age than any period of ancient civilization that was ever half as long.
A second fundamental fallacy, which well illustrates the difference between the artistic and the scientific mind and the greater readiness of the former to accept the claims of the Church, is the lack of testing and verification, in plain English, the failure of the artist to check his impression by testing it from various angles. If it occurs to a scientific man that a certain agency is the cause of a particular phenomenon he holds his tongue until he has convinced himself by a series, of check-studies that it explains the whole phenomenon and no other agency does. Scientific method is in this just the clarification of common- sense. Applied to our present subject it would inquire whether an artist is more inspired in sacred thin in profane subjects and whether and to what extent great religious works of art were produced by men of little or no religious feeling. We saw how ludicrously the protagonist of Catholic art fails to do this. But the common-sense inquiry would go much further. Was the European Renaissance the only great, or the greatest, period of artistic creation? And was there a religious inspiration in the other great periods, Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Arab? The plain conclusion emerges that if a man is a great artist it does not make any difference to his inspiration whether he has to paint a branch of cherry blossoms or a Buddha, a courtesan or a Virgin Mary, a peasant or a Christ. The Parthenon is the greatest religious building that was ever raised, and Pheideas its creator, was a skeptic.
Of the medieval cathedral in particular I have written much elsewhere and must be content with two points. It is obvious that if we have here a case of religious inspiration it must have been in the architects. But they are unknown. I cannot find that any writer on art has tried to compile even a short list or a biographical study of them, and the only such architect of whom I have found definite information, the architect of Speyer cathedral, was a roistering irreligious German bishop who was just as good at building a military fort or a castle. The second point is that modern experts on the Gothic style never notice religious inspiration, in their studies. The development of the style, on utilitarian as well as aesthetic lines, was spread over two generations and mainly occurred in the most frivolous and licentious region of France. The chief significance of it is that wealth was at this period rapidly expanding in Europe, and the clergy and monks got the most of it and wanted fine churches. It was a sound investment.
Another obvious cheek on this superficial Catholic theory is to inquire why great art so notably decayed after the 16th Century. In that pretentious collection of essays by American apologists, Catholic Action (2 vols., 1935), there is a section on "Catholic Action and Culture." The artistic convert who looks to it for what he believes to be the grandest argument for the Church, its inspiration of art, will be bitterly disappointed. The writer dismisses it in a few colorless lines, and the sterilization of Catholic art after the 16th Century is airily explained by saying that "we have not yet recovered" from the blight which the Reformation brought upon art. If the writer does not know that French painting (Poussin, Lorraine, Watteau, Greuze, Fragmard, etc.) and British painting only became great after the Reformation and was almost entirely humanist or naturalist, while Spanish and Italian art died though the countries were hermetically sealed against Protestant influence, he ought not to 'Mention the word art.
Looking for some serious recent Catholic reply to my question why, if the Catholic creed inspires art, it so conspicuously failed to do so in Italy, Spain, and Portugal when the Renaissance was over, although the Catholicism of those countries became stronger than ever, I find only two French works. The first, L art religieux apres le Concile de Trent (1932) by Emile Male, is a large work on religious art after the Council of Trent." It does not admit on my contention. For Spain and the Netherlands (steeped in Spanish culture) it reminds us of Velasquez, Murillo and Rubens. Yes: but they belong essentially to the Renaissance, which was late in Spain, and after them, Spanish art was vapid until the skeptical days of Goya (a quite blasphemous painter). As great painters of Spain and Italy the author gives Montanes, Pedro de Mena, Minana, Crespi, Dolci, Giordano, Caroselli. ... I hope you have heard of them.
The second book, La decandence de I'art sacre (1931), by A. Cingria (a Catholic) grants my whole contention. It is enough to translate the title, "The decadence of 'Sacred art." The kind of question that the author sets out to answer is: "Why do the majority of Christians now like ugliness"? He doesn't know. Let us put him right to some extent. They do not like ugliness except in the sense that a church in a poor uneducated district naturally reflects the poor taste of the worshipers. But Catholics would be only too pleased to have great art once more if they could get it. The Roman Church in America is many times as rich as the Italian Church was during the Renaissance and would pay ten or a hundred times as much as a medieval church or monastery did. They cannot get it. They have to import pictures from Spain, Italy, and Germany; and we should smile at the idea that the non-Catholic atmosphere of America prevents a Catholic artist from being inspired by Catholic ideas. The Church in Germany until a few years ago was as rich as the American. The Church in Spain and Spanish America is rich. But in the debauched monasteries of Germany and South America, where the Renaissance atmosphere of drink and sexual license is richly reproduced, no great art is produced.
Quebec is a medieval area with ideal Catholic conditions. Its Church is so rich that it is as zealous against Communism as Wall Street is. Cardinal Villeneuve, defending illegal acts against critics of the Church by the Catholic mayor of Montreal, said that above the laws of Canada is "the Law of Nature"; in the same sense as the Church overrides all modern civil law and claims to put folk to death on religious grounds. The taint of Protestantism never reached Quebec. Its people are poor and fanatical: its priests are rich, ignorant, and intolerant. But did you ever see any work of art that was produced in Quebec?
This artistic argument for the Church is futile because even if we could admit that it inspired great art in the later Middle Ages yet must add that it has no such inspiration today there does not seem to be much gain to the Pope. The claim is clearly rhetorical. Every man with what we may call average information knows that the production of great art is not continuous but is richest in certain definite periods that last a few centuries and then decay. There have been three in the history of China, three in that of Persia, two in the long history of ancient Egypt, one in Greece, one in the Moslem world, and so on. Europe got the conditions for its second golden age of art in the Middle Ages. It came to a close like all other such ages, though it began and ended later in France, England, and Spain than in Italy. It took so very largely a religious form because the Church was the richest employer and in so sensual and voluptuous an age it had a more extensive use than ever for art. This is what most of the chief historians of European art say. And remember always something which it is not their business to say but is of vital relevance to the Catholic claim of religious inspiration: that there is not in the whole history of religion, as far as we have positive knowledge or even ground for suspicion, so profound and general a religious corruption -- of Popes, cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, monk, and nuns -- as there was during the age (1300-1600) of supreme Catholic art. That nut wants some cracking. |
