What we can no longer pray to, we are now generally invited to garner facts about. Being an art ‘expert’ is associated primarily with knowing a great deaclass="underline" about where a work was made, who paid for it, where its artist’s parents came from and what his or her artistic influences may have been.
What should we do with her when we can’t pray to her? Virgin and Child, c. 1324, confiscated from the Abbey of Saint-Denis, Paris, in 1789. (illustration credit 8.1)
It can be so hard not to think of the cafeteria: Thomas Struth, National Gallery I, London 1989. (illustration credit 8.2)
In a cabinet in one of the medieval galleries of the Louvre we find a statuette identified as Virgin and Child, stolen from the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1789. For centuries before its relegation to the museum, people regularly knelt before it and drew strength from Mary’s compassion and serenity. However, to judge by its caption and catalogue entry, in the view of the modern Louvre, what we really need to do with it is understand it — understand that it is made of gilded silver, that in her free hand Mary holds a crystal fleur-de-lis, that the piece is typical of Parisian metalwork fabricated in the first half of the fourteenth century, that the figure’s overall shape derives from that of a Byzantine model called the Virgin of Tenderness and that this is the earliest dated French example of the translucent basse-taille enamelwork first developed by Tuscan craftsmen in the late thirteenth century.
Unfortunately, when it is presented to us principally as a storehouse of concrete information, art soon starts to lose its interest for all but a determined few. A measure of this indifference emerges from a series of images by the German photographer Thomas Struth which shows us tourists making their way around some of the world’s great museums. Patently unable to draw much sustenance from their surroundings, they stand bemused in front of Annunciations and Crucifixions, dutifully consulting their catalogues, perhaps taking in the date of a work or an artist’s name, while before them a line of crimson blood trickles down the muscular leg of the son of God or a dove hovers in a cerulean sky. They appear to want to be transformed by art, but the lightning bolts they are waiting for seem never to strike. They resemble the disappointed participants in a failed seance.
What might we do in front of this? Fiona Banner, Every Word Unmade, 2007. (illustration credit 8.3)
The puzzlement shared by museum-goers only increases when we turn to the art of our own era. We look at a giant neon version of the alphabet. We take in a vat of gelatinous water in which a sheet of aluminium fixed to a motor is swaying back and forth to the amplified sound of a human heartbeat. We watch a grainy film of an elderly woman slicing an apple, intercut with footage of a lion running across a savannah. And we think to ourselves that only an idiot or a reactionary would dare to ask what all this could mean. The only certainty is that neither the artist nor the museum is going to help us: wall texts are kept to a minimum; catalogues are enigmatically written. It would take a brave soul to raise a hand.
3.
Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to remind us about what matters. It exists to guide us to what we should worship and revile if we wish to be sane, good people in possession of well-ordered souls. It is a mechanism whereby our memories are forcibly jogged about what we have to love and to be grateful for, as well as what we should draw away from and be afraid of.
The German philosopher Hegel defined art as ‘the sensuous presentation of ideas’. It is, he indicated, in the business of conveying concepts, just like ordinary language, except that it engages us through both our senses and our reason, and is uniquely effective for its dual modes of address.
Audrey Bardou, grandparents with their grandchildren, 2008. (illustration credit 8.4)
Art is the sensuous presentation of ideas crucial to the health of our souls.
Here, a reminder of love. Top: Filippino Lippi, The Adoration of the Child, early 1480s. (illustration credit 8.5)
To return to one of the familiar themes of this book, we need art because we are so forgetful. We are creatures of the body as well as of the mind, and so require art to stir our languid imaginations and motivate us in ways that mere philosophical expositions cannot. Many of our most important ideas get flattened and overlooked in everyday life, their truth rubbed off through casual use. We know intellectually that we should be kind and forgiving and empathetic, but such adjectives have a tendency to lose all their meaning until we meet with a work of art that grabs us through our senses and won’t let us go until we have properly remembered why these qualities matter and how badly society needs them for its balance and its sanity. Even the word love has a habit of growing sterile and banal in the abstract, until the moment when we glimpse a contemporary photograph of two grandparents patiently feeding their grandchildren an apple purée for supper, or a fifteenth-century rendering of Mary and her son at nap-time — and remember why love lies at the core of our humanity.
We might modify Hegel’s definition to bring it more fully into line with Christianity’s insights: good art is the sensuous presentation of those ideas which matter most to the proper functioning of our souls — and yet which we are most inclined to forget, even though they are the basis for our capacity for contentment and virtue.
A role for art at key moments of life: tavolette. (illustration credit 8.6)
Christianity was never troubled by the notion of charging art with an educative, therapeutic mission. Its own art willingly aspired to the status of propaganda. Although the noun has become one of the more frightening in our lexicon, coloured by the sinister ends towards which certain historical regimes have put it to work, propaganda is a neutral concept in its essence, suggesting merely influence rather than any particular direction for it. We may associate propaganda with corruption and tasteless posters, but Christianity took it to be synonymous with the artistic enhancement of our receptivity to such qualities as modesty, friendship and courage.
From the fourteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a brotherhood in Rome was renowned for tracking down prisoners on their way to the gallows and placing before their eyes tavolette, or small boards bearing images from the Christian story — usually of Christ on the Cross or the Virgin and Child — in the hope that these representations would bring the condemned solace in their final minutes. It is difficult to conceive of a more extreme example of a belief in the redemptive capacity of images, and yet the brotherhood was only carrying out a mission to which Christian art has always been committed: that of putting examples of the most important ideas in front of us at difficult moments, to help us to live and to die.