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Ave Explores Series | Art and Architecture | Week 3
Sacred Art is Ever Ancient, Ever New
by Daniel Mitsui
“The Glorious Mysteries,” Mysteries of the Rosary, Daniel Mitsui
In the year 787 an ecumenical council was held in Nicaea, the same city where the Creed had been formulated and the Arian heresy condemned more than four centuries earlier. This Second Council of Nicaea was concerned with a different heresy, iconoclasm, that accused the faithful who venerated holy pictures of idolatry. The council fathers established the rightness and necessity of sacred artwork and articulated important principles for making it.
One of these principles stated:
“The composition of religious imagery is not the painter’s invention, but is approved by the law and tradition of the Catholic Church. The tradition does not belong to the painter; the art alone is his. . . . True arrangement and disposition belong to the holy fathers, who established it.”
In other words, sacred art is not something that can be made up at whim by an imaginative artist; it has an objective content that has been handed down through the centuries. It is necessarily traditional and one of the ways in which the ancient memory of Jesus Christ’s revelation endures.
For example, in almost any painting or carving of the Crucifixion from the Middle Ages or before, Jesus Christ faces the viewer. The wound is in his right side. Mary stands to his right. The good thief St. Dismas is also to his right and the bad thief to his left. If the darkened sun and moon are included, they are respectively to his right and left. The skull of Adam is at the foot of the Cross.
This arrangement is not coincidental but full of meaning. According to Church Fathers such as St. Augustine, Jesus Christ is the new Adam whose death redeems the original sin. Just as Adam’s bride came forth from his right side while he slept, so the Church—the bride of Jesus Christ—came forth from his right side when he died on Calvary. The blood and water that flowed from there represent the Sacraments of Eucharist and Baptism. Tradition holds that the skull of Adam was indeed buried on Mount Calvary, put there by Shem after the Great Flood.
The right hand of God, throughout Holy Scripture, is associated with mercy and the left hand with justice; it is for this reason that the emblems of the New Testament, the covenant of mercy, are gathered to the right side of the Cross (from Christ’s perspective). An artist who would arrange Mary, St. Dismas, and the sun in another way would fail to communicate this meaning.
That being said, religious artists should not fall into an opposite error of seeing the requirement of tradition as an instruction to make their pictures and statues the same again and again with no improvement upon the artistry or compositions of the past.
The wisdom of the Church Fathers is nearly inexhaustible; they wrote voluminously on the symbolic meaning of every passage of Holy Writ and on the symbolic meaning of God’s created world, manifested in the behavior of plants and animals, the properties of stones, the sums and products of numbers. So much of this wisdom has yet to be incorporated into sacred art. And so much more insight into the mysteries of both the Bible and nature is yet possible by looking to them afresh with the same kind of consideration that the Church Fathers had.
The idea that sacred art was perfected at some previous time in history treats sacred art as a completed and completable task, which nothing sacred can ever be. It denies that the ultimate source of art and beauty is heavenly, denies that to make truly sacred art is something toward which an artist must strive all his life and toward which artists collectively must strive for all of history.
Many religious artists have come to this realization gradually over the course of their artistic careers, starting at a stage of simply knowing what they like, whether that be Gothic panel paintings or Baroque oils or Byzantine icons, and what they do not. Eventually, they come to believe that the art they admire and imitate owes its worth to something more than subjective taste. They try to understand the principles governing it. They try to articulate its rules. They seek the influence from works of art that follow these rules and block the influence of works that break them.
The resulting artwork here is usually not bad; it usually can be described as just good enough. It might satisfy the basic instruction laid down in Nicaea in 787, but it does not truly impress.
Real progress happens when the artists advance to a new stage, one in which they have come to understand the governing principles so innately that they no longer need to regulate themselves constantly. The question that they ask themselves about other works of art is not “Does this follow the rules or not?” but rather, “What can I learn from this?” The entire world and all the art in it then becomes a possible source of inspiration. And that is when sacred art that is both traditional and interesting, both ancient and new, both familiar and surprising, comes into being from their hands.
Download this article as a PDF here.
Artist Daniel Mitsui specializes in ink drawing. He has been commissioned by the Vatican to create a new edition of the Roman Pontifical. Mitsui has three coloring books created with his religious artwork published by Ave Maria Press.
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