Beauty — The Highway to God — Dei Gratia Sacred Art

**Watch the full video of this lecture here:** **https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT_4GCy40oE&t=11s**

Because we are made in the image and likeness of God, we must say that every authentically human undertaking is infomed by Christianity whether or not the participants are baptised Christians or have had the Gospel preached to them. Our Catholic faith teaches us that all that is genuinely good, true, and beautiful comes from and leads to God. Tonight we will look at the beautiful: the highway to God.

My talk takes its title from Pope Benedict XVI, who so eloquently articulated the importance and primacy of the Way of Beauty, the ‘Via Pulchritudinis.’ He observed that “some artistic expressions are real highways to God, the supreme Beauty; indeed, they help us to grow in our relationship with him, in prayer. These are works that were born from faith and express faith.”

My thesis is that all great art, whether or not religious in subject matter, can lead us to God. It does this by enriching and healing our relationships: with nature, with culture, with ourselves, with each other, and, ultimately, with our good Creator.

I will speak about just a few artists, from the 15th-century to the present, all painters (since that’s my discipline), not all of whom were Catholic or painted religious subjects, but who are all citizens or descendants of Christendom, coming as they are from the western tradition. The art I am going to show you is not in chronological order, but begins with secular and ends with religious subjects. If you are new to looking at art, do not worry; I will guide you through these paintings, starting with subject matter and then building on how the elements of design are employed by the artists in order to convey meaning.

Rather than being guided by a philosophical definition of beauty (I am no philosopher), I want to emphasize the feeling that Simone Weil references when she writes: “In everything which gives us the pure authentic feeling of beauty there is really the presence of God [...] all art of the highest order is religious in essence.”

The words “pure and authentic” distinguish this feeling from mere sensual pleasure or a seductive yet destructive attraction. But let’s keep this personal and simple. We have all (hopefully) had experiences when we were deeply moved by beauty.

Let’s take a moment right now together to recollect the most beautiful thing that you have ever seen or experienced. Where and when in your life have you had a foretaste of heavenly beauty? The first time you beheld your child? Looking into the face of your beloved? In many-splendored nature? In receiving an act of unanticipated mercy? Walking into a great cathedral? Listening to a melliferous voice or symphony? Looking at a painting or a sculpture? Obviously not all of these are encounters with art and, in fact, most of us have probably remembered experiences with people or with nature. Nonetheless what art ultimately offers is relationship and, I argue, the authentic aesthetic feeling can be recognized precisely by the way it produces the same profundity of emotions and thoughts as relationships with other living creatures.

Left: The 15th-century *Ghent Altarpiece* or *Adoration of the Mystic Lamb* by Jan and Hubert van Eyck in situ in St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium

Before I go further I have to point out a problem: I have to show you digital images of paintings that are all physical objects of a certain sizes designed for a certain environments. Digital reproductions in no way communicate the originals’ presence, optics, aura, or atmosphere. For this reason I have chosen to show you only representational paintings, not because I do not admire abstract art, but because at least the pictorial content of representational art can be translated digitally, even if much else it lost.

Israel Hershberg, *A Cypress Assembly,* 1999. Oil on canvas mounted on wood

The first painting I want to discuss is by a modern observational realist painter who I have long admired, Israel Hershberg. I begin with this image because of the way it has impacted my perception of the world — my relationship with creation. After seeing this painting I began to notice those moments when the sun moved in its circuit to a lower angle past midday and, especially in the winter, when it cast a warmer amber-gold hue on the branches of trees. There were many cypress trees in my hometown and I remember walking and suddenly being caught - as if I was the one frozen in an unchanging painting - by the colour, texture, light, form, and even the atmosphere of nature re-presenting to me that which the artist had first noticed and represented in his painting. Why is this significant? Because this is an example of how experiencing a work of art which isolates a specific subject and/or impression in time, with all its attendant emotional, sensual, and symbolic associations, can cause us to pause and pay attention to the world when we encounter similar subjects.

“Attention,” Simone Weil writes, “taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

It is wondrous to me how a simple painting of a tree is so layered with relationships. First the artist pays attention to life and is moved to represent some aspect of it. The very act of making a painting is a testament to the worthiness of the subject; the artist as co-creator comes into agreement with the Creator who looked upon His creation and saw that it was very good (Gen 1:31). Then the viewer of the artwork looks at it and is enticed to look more carefully than she might at the same subject in nature because she is responding to the aesthetic decisions that the artist has made that render the subject appealing and full of human significance. The viewer then looks again at creation with eyes and mind attuned to its value and with a richer appreciation its meaning because her perception is now layered with both memory and art. Speaking specifically about realist painting, this sequence of relationships shows how so much more than mere imitation of nature is happening. Painting is not some kind of mechanical reproduction of what the eyes see; it is a selection, interpretation and, ultimately, a co-creative act with the Maker.

A cypress tree may be a rather mundane subject that is nonetheless elevated in the manner that I have described, but what about ugly subjects? What about the representation of unattractive man-made objects and spaces, or even of suffering and violence? Here is where art performs another kind of mystical operation. We have seen how the artist can act in accord with God, agreeing (and showing) that creation is good; the artist can also act as a kind of priest, redeeming ugliness and sorrow and pain by transfiguring it through art into something beautiful. For Christians the most explicit example of this are depictions of the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus, wherein a beautiful painting of this ugly subject imitates the mystery of God’s redemption through suffering. This dynamic occurs in the representation of what we expect or have known to be ugly, as beautiful.

Antonio Lopez Garcia, *The Bathroom*, 1966. Oil on board

My first example of this is Antonio Lopez Garcia’s The Bathroom in which the represented subject is a dingy, dirty, old bathroom. In this painting this scene could be described as transfigured in light. The brilliant luminosity that radiates through the window effectively makes all the particular (and carefully rendered) forms of sink, toilet, shower, even a can of Ajax, as lovely as the facets cut in a crystal to better reflect the light.

I could talk at length about the painterly prowess of the artist: his simplification yet specificity of form, his evident mark that vivifies rather than competes with the illusion, and the sly composition that puts the window in the place of the face in the body-like dimensions of the door frame. But what I want you to take away is just this: anything, in the hands of an artist, can be made beautiful. This aesthetic transformation is necessary to give us hope in our own, and the whole world’s, redemption.

To again quote Pope Benedict XVI: “The experience of beauty does not remove us from reality, on the contrary, it leads us to a direct encounter with the daily reality of our life, liberating it from darkness, transfiguring it, making it radiant and beautiful.”

Joseph Mallord William Turner, *Slave Ship: Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on,*1840. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts Boston

Next is a complex example of an ugly, an evil subject, beautifully portrayed. At first glance we behold pure colour, movement, and the almost biblical drama of light parting the waters. This celebrated and controversial painting by Turner is called Slave Ship, and its full title is ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on.’ He based the painting on the true story of the Zong massacre when, in 1781, the captain of a British slave ship had sick and dying enslaved people thrown overboard so that he could collect insurance money only available for those ‘lost at sea.’

When we look at the detail in the right foreground we perceive a severed human leg and other body parts being devoured in the boiling and bloody sea. How can we reconcile our perception of the beauty and splendor of the image with the horror of the subject?

Is the artist’s representation or our own admiration of it immoral? When this painting was made in 1840, slavery had recently been abolished in England but was still active in the United States. Turner’s depiction drew attention, we may even say unsuspecting and unwilling attention, to the horrors of the slave trade. The dissonance produced by the experience of beauty on the one hand, and the recognition of evil on the other, compels the examination of one’s concience and of one’s culture. This is an example of art attracting attention to reveal a reality which might otherwise be ignored. This painting was in fact later purchased by an American abolitionist, Alice Hooper.

Further, just as the beauty of colour and light first impress us, and we afterwards notice the subject, so also the subject does not have the last word. As we continue to look we are again drawn to appreciate the elemental power of light and water communicated through brushstrokes, hue, and value. Throughout his luminous career, Turner was a painter of the sublime. The 18th-century concept of the sublime was that perceiving the power of nature, either directly or in art, produced feelings of fear and awe in viewers and awareness of their relative insignificance. In Slave Ship one could see brute nature portrayed as indifferent to all the human drama, presenting to us the very problem of indiscriminate suffering in the natural world augmented by the malevolence of fallen humanity. The very problem, and our question of how this can be is, I argue, a preparation for the reception of the Gospel. When art is honest about our human experience, it compels us to search out sense and salvation.

As Pope Benedict XVI said in his address to artists: “Art, in all its forms, at the point where it encounters the great questions of our existence, the fundamental themes that give life its meaning, can take on a religious quality, thereby turning it into a path of profound inner reflection and spirituality.”

The first owner of this painting, the art critique John Ruskin, had a different interpretation of Turner’s Slave Ship. He saw the typhoon as a kind of force of divine retribution to the slavers. He vividly describes this painting, layering yet more artistry upon the image through his lyrical meditation. An excerpt reads:

Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight,—and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

Rembrandt van Rijn, *Self Portrait,* 1659. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art

I want to look next at how portrait or figurative paintings can enliven our relationships with ourselves and with others. I present to you an exquisite, pathetic, and arresting self-portrait by Rembrandt. One does not need to be familiar with the tragic legends surrounding the artist’ later years in order to be emotionally stirred by this portrait. One is pinioned by the artist’s gaze.

The lucidity, self-awareness, pathos, and unadorned honesty of that gaze. Who (who has suffered anything) can not empathize with the expression? More than this, art can teach us about human experiences and emotions that we ourselves have not yet known. Think of how the story of the adventures or inner life of the protagonist of a great novel or a film can expand our understanding of humanity. Our souls can adopt experiences of others through art as our own.

And because this painting (or any work of art) is not actually a person, because there is nothing that one can do to compassionate the protagonist, the only possible response to that gaze is introspection. We can try to keep it on the outside by narrating facts of the life of the artist but, really, the longer we look the more his self-portrait becomes our own and we are called to ask, have I ever looked at myself so honestly, much less revealed such vulnerability to others?

The honesty of the artist demands honesty from us, the introspection of the artist prompts introspection from us, the hope or faith manifested in the laborious and masterful artistic execution of a painful emotion — this too, pulls forth hope from us. We can see this portrait as the image of a wounded man, yet with what resilience and artistry he represents that state of anguish! Here, again, is a transfiguration. We can see this wounded man as ourselves. We can, by extension, see this as the Man of Sorrows — he is not us, yet, through our mingled gazes, he is.

Johannes Vermeer, *Woman Reading a Letter,* c. 1662-1663. Oil on canvas. Rijksmuseum

In Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter, painted only a few years after Rembrandt’s 1659 Self Portrait, we are ushered - quietly, walking softly so as not to disturb the cloistered harmony of this domestic scene - into a distinctly different type of relationship with the figure portrayed. Here we look upon a woman whose attention is wholly absorbed in a private matter. She is inviolate, she is contained, held, by the very composition of the painting. Composition is the arrangement of shapes within the rectangle, from the largest overall aggregate shape to the smaller component parts. As we approach, we are impeded by the edge of the dark table on the left and the chair on the right in the foreground which set the woman apart. Meanwhile, the map of the world frames her face and intersects with that cluster of light where her hands hold the creased white paper — the brightest light in the whole painting.

The daylight (from an unseen source) limning her body and profile makes a vertical line that is crossed (as already seen at the point where her gaze is enraptured) by the arrow-like rod at the bottom of the map, thus forming the shape of a cross: a stable design that further secures the figure, visually anchoring what must necessarily have been a temporary moment, so that as it is presented unchanged before our eyes hundreds of years after it was painted, we are unsurprised. Natural flickering change of light, of movement, of human attention — all these these are alien to this scene which exudes not only stability and solitude but eternity where we would not expect to find it: in a woman’s private business, in a modern middle-class home, in the cool blue light of day. Let’s talk about that light for a moment, that blue. Vermeer famously used a pigment called Delft Blue which was in fact the local Delft blue-painted porcelain tiles which were ground up to make a pale blue pigment. This he glazed over with pigment from the semi-precious stone lapis lazuli in the darker blue shadows. I mention this because in Gothic and Renaissance paintings the expensive pigment lapis was often reserved for the painting of the Virgin’s blue mantle. What Vermeer has done is to represent his (probably) pregnant wife in the virginal blue of Mary and the local dust of the industry of his city. Thus, on a material level we are presented with an ordinary, local and particular woman clad in the raiment and portrayed with the robust interiority of the Mater Amabilis. This symbolic reading is reinforced by the contrast of the flat, paper map - terra firma - behind the body of the woman whose torso shines like the blue globe of the earth, or the still waters over which the spirit hovered. This painting tells us, whispers to us, about the dignity of the domestic, the mystery of motherhood, the immance of the divine. It is natural light that shines upon this apparently ordinary scene, and at the same time it is undeniably a divine light that shines upon the woman.

I will turn finally to two works of explicitly Catholic religious art. What makes them religious art is their subject matter; what makes them good art is their integrity of form and content and the honesty or conviction of the visions represented; what makes them good religious art is how that integrity enriches, reveals, and complicates the religious themes, thus visually preaching the Gospel with eloquence like a great homilist or church father, rather that just putting forward a static symbol for us to recognize and consume without the opportunity of being transformed or sanctified by it.

As the artist Marc Chagall wrote: “For centuries painters have dipped their paintbrush in that coloured alphabet which is the Bible. Thus how often artistic expression can bring us to remember God, to help us to pray or even to convert our heart!”

Piero della Francesca, *The Resurrection,* 1467-1468. Fresco. Museo Civico of Sansepolcro

Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection fresco was painted in a public meeting hall, now the current Civic Museum. Christ is depicted life-sized and shown rising from the tomb with sleeping soldiers below. What I want to demonstrate in this painting is the further symbolic power of composition.

Composition, as we have already seen in the Vermeer, can create stability; it can also create dynamism, rhythm, or disorder. In the case of Piero’s Resurrection fresco we are given a very stable triangular composition, corresponding to the symbol of the Holy Trinity. The base of the triangle is formed by the tomb, while the bodies and heads of the soldiers form the sides of the triangle which has its apex in the face of Christ, which is also one of the perspectival vanishing points in the composition.

The triumphant crown of the triangular composition is the face of the Risen Lord, powerfully underscored by His gaze which is the only one which looks directly and evenly back at the viewer — with steadiness, certainty, even a kind of opacity that bespeaks His Divinity.

But this is not the extent of Piero’s use of composition to communicate the message and meaning of the Resurrection. I will let the art critic, John Berger, guide us through another design aspect of this painting:

Its centre, though not of course its true centre, is Christ’s hand, holding his robe as he rises up. This is no casual gesture. It appears to be central to Christ’s whole upward movement out of the tomb. The hand, resting on the knee, also rests on the brow of the first line of hills behind, and the folds of the robe flow down like streams. Downwards. Look now at the soldiers so mundanely, so convincingly asleep. Only the one on the extreme right appears somewhat awkward. His legs, his arm between them, his curved back are understandable. Yet how can he rest like that just on one arm? This apparent awkwardness gives a clue. He looks as though he were strung in a hammock. Strung from where? Suddenly go back to the hand, and now see that all four soldiers lie in an invisible net, trawled by that hand. The emphatic grip makes perfect sense. The four heavy sleeping soldiers are the catch the resurrecting Christ has brought with him from the underworld, from death.

Interestingly, the artist has painted his self portrait as one of the sleeping soldiers. As Berger has shown us, Piero is making an analogy between the sleeping soldiers and the souls in the underworld which Christ rescues. The soldiers in the Gospels are Romans: pagan unbelievers. By painting himself as one of them, he is suggesting how a state of unbelief or of sin is like death which awaits the salvation of the Risen Lord. Thus we see how form and content, through composition, are united to convey meaning.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, *Supper at Emmaus*, 1601. Oil on canvas. National Gallery London

Remaining with the Resurrected Christ in this Eastertide season, the last image that I will examine with you is Caravaggio’s 1601 Supper at Emmaus. I recently completed a reconstruction of this painting for a private client, so I lived with and studied this painting for over a year. I offered a lecture on the theological symbolism in this painting (which some of you attended) which exceeds the time I have for this whole presentation. For now, I want to put this image before you in order to explore how the viewer’s active engagement with the painting is contrived by both what is shown and what is not shown by the artist.

It is oftentimes the case that a painting will raise a question or prompt uncertainty which may or may not be answered through the painting’s internal content, thus initiating an attitude of searching or reflection that complicates and enriches our initial understanding of the subject. This potential for discomfort is necessary to break out of prosaic and habitable patterns of thought that (at best) mute our apprehension of realty, and (at worst) are genuinely dangerous, especially in the context of religion.

First I want to point our how we the viewer are invited to the table in this painting. Our place is open on the bottom left side of the composition. If we may be shy to take our place among the apparent strangers, the artist makes it urgent that we come close by painting the precarious basket of fruit that is about to fall off the table unless we imaginatively intervene. This is the opposite move as in Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter; here we are drawn right into the action.

And as in Piero’s simultaneous compositional meanings, this basket of fruit is doing other work besides drawing us in: its precariousness and over-ripe luscious contents together represent the spoilable fruits of the world in opposition to the Eucharist, the bread of life, on the opposite side of the table.

To return to the dynamic of viewer engagement through the means of lack of information, the viewer of this painting may well ask, who exactly are these strangers? The man in the center does not resemble Jesus as He is typically portrayed. We know that this is the Supper at Emmaus because the title tells us, so we are looking for the glorified Christ. The Gospels describe how Jesus revealed Himself suddenly in the breaking of the bread to two disciples who had been talking and walking with Him all day without realizing who He was. And then, just an instant after their eyes are opened and they recognize the Christ, He vanishes again from their midst. So Caravaggio masterfully places us in the dramatic instant of revelation and we the viewers have to look for clues in the other symbols present in order to identify with the disciples who this man is. We can look for clues in the central figure’s the blessing of the bread, in the table prepared like an altar with a white cloth for the Eucharistic feast, in the hidden ichthys (fish) symbol in the weave of the basket, in the reaction of the disciples, or in the history of Christian art where we discover the beardless Christ, the Apollonian type, which is being visually quoted by Caravaggio. This is an example of a work of art that raises a question, in this case - who is this? - to cause us to enter into the story, to share, in real time, the experiences of those portrayed.

In each painting that we have observed, there has been no detail that is irrelevant, no visual element that is not in insoluble relationship to all the others in that happy marriage of form and content that makes a great work of art, wherein all the composite parts, through their orchestral interworking, create something irreducibly more. Whether it is the blue of the woman’s jacket in Vermeer that evokes the watery globe and simultaneously illustrates her particularity and universality; the triangular composition in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, his association of sleep with death and the rising Christ raising those from the death of disbelief or the underworld; the impasto paint strokes that seem to sculpt the face of Rembrandt while creating the hues of a living man and amplifying his gaze; the almost abstract intensity of motion and colour in Turner that, like God’s providence, proclaims that there is more at the end - whether judgment or mercy - than man’s disorder. Yes, all of these meanings and more are communicated through visual language in the paintings we have seen. Art draws our attention, firing up symbolic and poetic connections in the viewer, showing the intrinsic dignity of things precisely by revealing that they are not an end in themselves but exist in myriad living relationships.

Ultimately, the attention that we give to art should lead us into contemplation, and that contemplation should in turn prepare our souls for adoration of Him who is the fullness and perfection of all beauty: God incarnate in Jesus Christ.

Hans Memling, *St. John Triptych,* c. 1479. Oil on panel, Memling Museum

In the left panel of Hans Memling’s radiant St. John Triptych he portrays St. John the Evangelist (on the bottom left) beholding the Apocalypse and God enthroned in glory. Remember that we are all destined for the beatific vision, the contemplation of God face to face.

By beholding beauty here and now, by allowing it to permeate our souls and transform us, we prepare ourselves for eternity. Do you notice that in whatever memory of beauty you may have recalled at the beginning of this talk, there is the sensation that you are too small to fully receive it? We intuitively feel that we have to become better, more tender, more Christ-like in order to receive the gift of beauty.

As Pope Benedict XVI said, “Authentic beauty [...] unlocks the yearning of the human heart, the profound desire to know, to love, to go towards the Other, to reach for the Beyond. If we agknowledge that beauty touches us intimately, that it wounds us, that it opens our eyes, then we rediscover the joy of seeing, of being able to grasp the profound meaning of our existence, the Mystery of which we are part; from this Mystery we can draw fullness, happiness, the passion to engage with it every day.”

I will close with another quote, this by Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Beauty is the last word that the thinking intellect dares to speak, because it simply forms a halo, an untouchable crown around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to each other.”

Beauty — The Highway to God

Saint Veronica Giuliani