The Gods in art. Andre Malraux’s fascinating The Metamorphosis of the Gods continues to fascinate. How sacred art of the ancients becomes reborn and transformed as Christianity evolves. Idolatry? …
The humanization of art. In the waning age of Faith, beauty moves from the saint to the statue-Mary, Queen of Heaven, becomes the suffering mother of Christ….
The Gothic revelation of the City of God, the art of the Coronation period, was the work of a Christian imagination still concerned with Truth. Now, that imagination becomes increasingly concerned with mere figments. For nine hundred years, the great image-makers were artists only in the sense that the prophets of israel were poets. But now, as happened in Greece, the self-abnegation of the artist ceases. As the gods did before, the saints become status. The Beau Dieu of Amiens was beautiful only in the sense that beauty was considered a divine attribute. And when the people of Liege called their Virgin the most beautiful in Christendom, they referred to the Virgin and not to the statue; without her crown, she would not have been the most beautiful young mother in Europe. But now, the word “beautiful” refers to the work of art itself. “It expresses an admiration quite distinct from religious sentiment…The aesthetic sense is born in Christendom.”
The artist clearly leaves his mark on his work; status of prophets or apostles now typically display ostentatious curls, coil-shaped or pinpointed beards, fluted robes. realistic touches are mixed with the bizarre. The Prophet of Strasbourg “lifts a hand whose veins are minutely copied from life toward an archaically Chinese bronze beard.” The religious, no longer expressed naturally or easily, becomes stylized. “Without realism, no human figure; without stylization, no saint.” ( to be continued)…