Sacred Art #2: What Governs the Style of the Traditions
How the anthropology of the Theology of the Body accounts for the iconographic, Gothic, and Baroque styles, and why the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo is not among them.
The second of two related articles on the three authentic liturgical traditions of the Church. In the first, I asked what sacred art is for and introduced the three traditions Benedict XVI identifies: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Here I turn to what accounts for the differences between them — the understanding of the human person that each embodies — and explain why the High Renaissance, so often considered the summit of Catholic art, is not among them.
What governs the style of these traditions?
The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person — what theologians call anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.
First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.
Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.
Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven — immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.
These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).
The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc — the halo — represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.
The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition — the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.
The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.
[Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgement, by Jose Ribera, Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style]
Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.
The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.
The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.
[Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.]
A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation — Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case — in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom — the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.
Why not the High Renaissance?
Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance — the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.
All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.
The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism — as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists' training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.
The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:
The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.
The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129
The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point — attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.
The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.
This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.
