Book Review: “Painting Salvation” by Fr Armand de Malleray

Review by Angeline Tan

For years, I thought that art critique and appreciation necessitated a certain level of erudition, historical knowledge, as well as the so-called “keen eye for art”, which I did not possess. Thus, whenever I strolled past stunning paintings, such as those from French painter Nicolas Poussin, or his Spanish counterpart Diego Velázquez, I was pretty certain that my amateurish responses to these masterpieces were mere babblings, if anything at all.

Yet after reading Fr Armand de Malleray (FSSP)’s recent book, Painting Salvation, while en route to Rome, the Eternal City, a vibrant canvas where jaw-dropping pieces of Catholic art inspire and elevate souls to God, I was glad to be proven wrong in my views regarding art evaluation. 

Artistic Glory in Churches is Still Perfectly Possible today: the New Altarpiece of Chéméré-le-Roi (Video)

 The Fraternity of Saint Vincent Ferrer, the traditional Catholic community of Dominican heritage and liturgy in Northwest France, officially consecrated this past weekend the new altar and altarpiece of their new conventual church, in Chéméré-le-Roi.

The consecration was celebrated by Bp. Alain Castet, Emeritus of Luçon.

See the video below as this glorious majestic contemporary masterpiece, the Altar of the Rosary, is opened to public view for the first time:

Contemporary Catholic Art: The Remarkable New Paintings by Clemens Fuchs for the Remodeling of the Chapel of the True Cross (Heiligenkreuz, Austria) - Video

From the website of the Holy Cross Abbey, Austria:

An iconographic project worthy of the Middle Ages — the traditionalist Fraternity of St Vincent Ferrer’s monumental altar in progress

The 1/10 scale model of the future high altar of Our Lady of the Rosary (with wings closed)

The Fraternity of Saint Vincent Ferrer, which has just finished building its conventual church, Our Lady of the Rosary, in Chéméré-le-Roi (Mayenne, France), has decided to construct a monumental historiated high altar. How did this project develop? What will it look like? Richard de Seze interviewed the Father Jordan-Mary, responsible for the project.

Event in New York City: Sacred Art Conference for Young Adults

 

On Saturday, December 11th, Juventutem NYC will host a Sacred Art Conference at the Shrine Church of the Holy Innocents in New York City. The event will begin at 1:00pm with Holy Mass in the traditional Roman Rite, followed by talks on topics such as “Sanctifying Grace and Sacred Beauty” and “Churches as sacred spaces that consecrate and defend the consecrated.” The conference is held in honor of St Nicholas, and seven notable Italian Baroque paintings of the Miracles of Saint Nicholas from the private Papenhoek Collection will be presented for private devotion. The afternoon will round off with a young adult social with refreshments. Register by December 10th at JuventutemNYC.com/Events. Admission is $20 to help defray some of the costs and additional donations are gratefully appreciated. The Shrine of the Holy Innocents is located at 128 West 37th Street (at Broadway) in Manhattan. The parish is readily accessible by regional transit and is at walking distance from Penn Station.

On the 500th Anniversary of the Death of Raphael (Raffaelo Sanzio da Urbino)

"Finally, he confessed and was penitent, 

and ended the course of his life at the age of thirty-seven, 

on the same day that he was born, 

which was Good Friday."

(April 6, 1520)

[From Vasari's Lives:]

How bountiful and benign Heaven sometimes shows itself in showering upon one single person the infinite riches of its treasures, and all those graces and rarest gifts that it is wont to distribute among many individuals, over a long space of time, could be clearly seen in the no less excellent than gracious Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, who was endowed by nature with all that modesty and goodness which are seen at times in those who, beyond all other men, have added to their natural sweetness and gentleness the beautiful adornment of courtesy and grace, by reason of which they always show themselves agreeable and pleasant to every sort of person and in all their actions. Him nature presented to the world, when, vanquished by art through the hands of Michelangelo Buonarroti, she wished to be vanquished, in Raffaello, by art and character together. And in truth, since the greater part of the craftsmen who had lived up to that time had received from nature a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendour of those virtues that make men immortal, there was right good reason for her to cause to shine out brilliantly in Raffaello, as a contrast to the others, all the rarest qualities of the mind, accompanied by such grace, industry, beauty, modesty, and excellence of character, as would have sufficed to efface any vice, however hideous, and any blot, were it ever so great. Wherefore it may be surely said that those who are the possessors of such rare and numerous gifts as were seen in Raffaello da Urbino, are not merely men, but, if it be not a sin to say it, mortal gods; and that those who, by means of their works, leave an honourable name written in the archives of fame in this earthly world of ours, can also hope to have to enjoy in Heaven a worthy reward for their labors and merits.

Raffaello was born at Urbino, a very famous city in Italy, at three o'clock of the night on Good Friday, in the year 1483, to a father named Giovanni de' Santi, a painter of no great excellence, and yet a man of good intelligence, well able to direct his children on that good path which he himself had not been fortunate enough to have shown to him in his boyhood. And since Giovanni knew how important it is to rear infants, not with the milk of nurses, but with that of their own mothers, no sooner was Raffaello born, to whom with happy augury he gave that name at baptism, than he insisted that this his only child--and he had no more afterwards--should be suckled by his own mother, and that in his tender years he should have his character formed in the house of his parents, rather than learn less gentle or even boorish ways and habits in the houses of peasants or common people. When he was well grown, he began to exercise him in painting, seeing him much inclined to such an art, and possessed of a very beautiful genius: wherefore not many years passed before Raffaello, still a boy, became a great help to Giovanni in many works that he executed in the state of Urbino. In the end, this good and loving father, knowing that his son could learn little from him, made up his mind to place him with Pietro Perugino, who, as he heard tell, held the first place among painters at that time. He went, herefore, to Perugia: but not finding Pietro there, he set himself, in order to lessen the annoyance of waiting for him, to execute some works in S. Francesco. When Pietro had returned from Rome, Giovanni, who was a gentle and well-bred person, formed a friendship with him, and, when the time appeared to have come, in the most adroit method that he knew, told him his desire. And so Pietro, who was very courteous and a lover of beautiful genius, agreed to have Raffaello: whereupon Giovanni, going off rejoicing to Urbino, took the boy, not without many tears on the part of his mother, who loved him dearly, and brought him to Perugia, where Pietro, after seeing Raffaello's method of drawing, and his beautiful manners and character, formed a judgment of him which time, from the result, proved to be very true.

Breathtakingly Beautiful Christianity

Santa Croce, Florence

"No religion has ever expressed as much beauty as the Christian religion with its infinite quantity of wonders."

Vittorio Sgarbi

Italy's most famous, most brilliant and most controversial art historian and critic

Christ in Art: Caravaggio and the Noble Normalcy of the Risen Christ -- by Maureen Mullarkey

Our Gospels tell us very little of the post-Passion appearances of Jesus. In compensation for the dearth of anecdote, artists have seized that encounter on the road to Emmaus. A popular motif for centuries, it challenges artists to picture a revelation at once quotidian and sublime. Few have met that challenge with the power and subtlety of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Christians profess faith in Jesus as True God and True Man, his humanity and divinity indivisible. That faithful unity loses something of its purity in the effort of depiction. It is no easy thing for Western verisimilitude to suggest “the radiance of the glory of God,” as Paul states in Hebrews 1:3, without tilting the Incarnate Word into something dewy and ethereal, making human flesh a costume rather than—Paul again—“the exact imprint of his nature.” Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus reminds us that the resurrected Christ and the Galilean man are one.

Caravaggio. Supper at Emmaus (1601).

Caravaggio painted two renditions of the theme. The first (1601, above) hangs in the National Gallery, London. The second, painted five years later, is in the Brera, Milan. Completed while he was on the lam from Rome for having murdered a well-known pimp, the 1606 variation (below) is subdued. Gestures are restrained, color is understated, the table cleared of all but bread and wine, elements of the Eucharist. Atmosphere is darksome, the Christ figure more conventional. Its greater solemnity brings Caravaggio’s unflinching realism—not customary at the time—within the orbit of traditional patterns of depiction.

Yet it is the earlier work that conveys the drama of that instant of recognition with greater potency. And particular earthiness.

The U.S. churches Francis will visit

Pope Francis is currently in the United States, for the first time in his life.

During his visit in America, he will step inside five churches (not including chapels): the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and Saint Patrick's church, all in Washington, D.C.; the Cathedral of Saint Patrick in New York City; and the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia.

Remarkably, four of the five churches still have altar rails, which of course will not be used during any of the liturgies with this pope.  All of the churches were built before the Second Vatican Council, and three of them have seen traditional Latin Masses offered at their main altars since the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei in 1988.

Having visited each of these churches, we thought it may be of interest to present a brief summary, from a traditional viewpoint, of the sacred spaces the Holy Father will encounter.

1) The Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle started out as a parish church when Washington, D.C. was part of the Archdiocese of Baltimore. It is most known for the Requiem Low Mass offered by Richard Cardinal Cushing, archbishop of Boston, for President John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963.

Today, in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, it is considered one of the most liberal parishes in the region, with a notable portion of its congregation opposed to Church teachings and natural law (to put it kindly). Although the cathedral offers a Sunday morning novus ordo partially in Latin (except when something more important bumps it) attempts to offer traditional Latin Masses have been denied.  The cardinal-archbishop lives at another parish, not at the cathedral.

Contemporary "Art": Defilement of a Sacred Building with the Blessing of a Cardinal (guest-post)

“Corporeity and Sexuality”

A peculiar art exhibit in one of Vienna’s great churches:

Some thoughts from the point of view of art history and art theology

Tibor I. Szabó [First English version]

Built following a failed assassination attempt on the Emperor Francis Joseph in 1853, Vienna’s Votive Church (Votivkirche) is one of the preeminent monuments of the Austrian Capital. From 25 April to 15 June 2014, a bizarre exhibit was held there, under the auspices of Viennese Archbishop Christoph Card. Schönborn. The homepage of the Votive Church had the following information to offer on the matter:

“This exhibit puts art at the center of a critical dialogue between religious and non-religious perspectives on human sexuality, the body, desire, and relationships. The artworks do not take up religious themes. Yet by exhibiting them in a church, they can take on a religious dimension, to be found not so much in the objects themselves, as in the context of the overall experience. The concept behind this exhibit is based on the premise that churches are more than a mere backdrop for liturgical functions. […] The exhibit aims to create a basis for dialogue between contemporary art and the so-called ‘theology of the body’. […] That is why each installation is carefully integrated into the church’s architecture and its religious significance has been respected, both in whole and in part. Visitors profit from contemplating, and engaging critically with, the experience the exhibit creates, from comparing their own experiences with those inspired by this dialogue, as well as from ensuing impressions.”¹

Some thoughts on the experience

Sacred beauty in the 21st Century - it is possible

From the Fall-Winter Appeal of the Monks of Norcia (Nursia), Italy:

Important: Save the Date - Sacra Liturgia 2015, in America

Sicut cervus ad fontes...

Traditional Western Christian Art Still Being Made