“If we are to make the Gothic artform relevant to today’s faithful we have to start with what is needed.”
Copy or Adapt?
Reviving the Gothic artform to meet the needs of the Church today is somewhat more complicated than it initially appears. We do not want to simply copy the forms of the medieval period, that would not speak to the contemporary faithful.
Artists can of course benefit from copying the past. This is how we learn. But it is a means to an end and not the end itself. In replicating the work of the past the artist learns certain conventions that define the characteristics of Gothic and Iconographic sacred art that stand in contrast to “modern art.” They learn for example how to render figures in the middle ground, how the gestures, clothing, and posture of figures convey a message. They learn other forms of perspective than what they may have been taught in school.
But simply copying the form of the past is not enough. In order to transpose the form to the modern day we have to understand why Gothic art looks the way it does. This is “copying with understanding.” In a sense we have to understand the rules before we can change or adapt them. In this case, we have history to guide is.
Art History is a Story
Art history is notoriously boring. There is a saying among art students that the best thing about taking art history is that you do not have to take it again. When God was removed from almost all aspects of our daily life during the period known as the enlightenment, we lost our story. The study of art history became a collections of names, dates, and technical progress.
But the history of art is not a collection of data, it is a chronicle of the human story. Every artistic era owed something to what had gone before and the Iconographic/Gothic is no different.
There is a vague popular notion that with the fall of the Roman empire, much of human knowledge was lost. This included the artistic knowledge of how to render natural objects, people, animals, plants etc., in a realistic fashion. How else do we account for the shift from classical Greek and Roman statues to the flat stylized images of the Byzantine and Medieval periods? In fact we can account for them very simply. The cultural needs of the Greeks and Romans, and the requirements they imposed upon artists, was very different than the needs required of artists in the Byzantine and Medieval periods.
Late antiquity had become very adept at reproducing nature in paint and wood and stone. “Beauty” in such works became more and more a priority. But the ideas and needs of early Christian art were not the same as the pagan Greeks and Romans. Although we have evidence that the medieval sculptor or woodcarver had the technical ability to create a very naturalistic figure, such a statue would be inappropriate in early churches as it might be seen as a return to paganism. It would take many centuries before the artist could, for example, paint the wings of angels without recalling the ancient figures of the goddess, Nike.
The early Church, in addition to avoiding the connotations of pagan art, wanted most of all for art to tell the Christian story. The art had to be simple and direct to support the sermons heard from the pulpit. This did not mean ignoring the artistic lessons of the past, but rather adapting them to the needs of the present. Byzantine iconography still carried hints of classical art in the way that clothing draped over the figure. Folds and creases followed the form beneath could still be seen in the bending of elbows and knees. Faces and gestures were rendered in ways that built upon the Greek styles that had gone before.
The Gothic form then built upon the Iconographic, as the needs of the Church in the West began to change. Crusaders returning from the east brought new knowledge and new experiences of a much larger world. Gothic art responded to those needs and a different spiritual emphasis.
And so the Iconographic and Gothic artforms, like all periods or styles of art, were a response to the needs of the people. The art preserved in manuscripts, wall paintings, frescos, and mosaics, did not indicate a loss of knowledge but a difference in culture.
What is Needed?
If we are to make the Gothic artform relevant to today’s faithful we have to start with what is needed. What do the people in the pews cry out for? What has been lost in recent years that we desperately need to recover?
Certainly we can say that beauty is more important now than it perhaps was in the 13th century. As Pope Saint John Paul II told us, the vocation of the artist is Beauty. We see this in the revival of the Iconographic form. There are many iconographers working today that produce icons far more beautiful than their ancient prototypes.
In addition to beauty we need to catechize each new generation. While we are a much more literate society than we were 800 years ago, we have become aliterate. We can read, we just simply, in many cases, choose not to. And so that ancient need for art to tell our story is still there, perhaps with a greater emphasis on telling it beautifully.
In very general terms the Iconographic form still serves the spirituality of the East with its emphasis on the divinization of man. And while icons that are produced today can be quite beautiful, do they really speak to the spirituality of the West which generally focuses more on working out mankind’s salvation?
I think a revival of the Gothic form, adapted to today’s needs, may be one brick in the rebuilding of our faith that has suffered terribly from the social upheavals of the last few decades not to mention the last few centuries.
How then do we adapt this form? We can start by looking at how it was done in the recent past. More on that next week.
Pax vobiscum