For several centuries the Catholic Church played a central, decisive role in the development of European art and architecture. The dominance of Catholicism is evident even if, allowing for the Reformation, you slightly extend the term Catholic to Christian churches. Any typical Western art history acknowledges this fact.
It is also true that any typical history reflects what can be described as the gradual secularization of art and architecture, a process that paralleled scientific and philosophical research, and political and technological change, and the slow erosion of the church’s role in social and political life. . From this reading, we are led to a point where, by early modernity, the church has lost its connection to artistic greatness, and religious art produced scandals in a relative primacy.
Suzanna Ivanič’s beautifully presented book Catholica is refreshing and innovative in that it turns this narrative on its head. Rather than being an account of past glories and subsequent decline, her book shows no inclination to explore that familiar historical ground or trace that trajectory. Nor is it a history as such, although it includes a mass of detailed and informative historical material. Rather, it’s a guidebook of sorts, in the sense that it resembles one of those dense, packed volumes you might buy before visiting an unfamiliar city. And Catholic turns out to be a stranger place than you might think.
Rich imagery and display played essential roles throughout, in the form of didactic biblical narratives and stunning ornate artifacts.
Some of the highlights of European art and architecture inevitably feature prominently. They include one of the most famous of all – thanks to Dan Brown – Leonardo’s Last Supper, as well as Velázquez’s brilliant paintings of the Crucified Christ and the Immaculate Conception and Vermeer’s allegory of the Catholic faith – it (painted when the Dutch Republic, Ivanič points out, had driven Catholics underground). Giotto’s 24-panel fresco masterpiece, The Life of Christ, spreads over two pages, as does Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. But Catholicism is not just a collection of points of high culture by any measure, and thank God. There are many of them already.
Ivanič is a Kent-based academic and her research interest in “lived religion and material and visual culture in Central Europe” accurately sums up the nature of her book, although it has a wider geographical scope: as Catholicism expanded not only throughout Europe, but, from the 16th century, in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
Rich imagery and display played essential roles throughout the world, in the form of didactic biblical narratives and dazzling ornate objects. The most precious and expensive materials and the best artists and craftsmen were enlisted to “glorify God.” The visual culture of Catholicism, however, extends far beyond Julius II who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It is not surprising that Catholic visual culture continues to influence and influence the contemporary world on countless levels, from high fashion to pop.
It’s not just cathedrals, she points out; it extends “to small objects of personal devotion worn as accessories or used in the home.” She finds room for, and carefully explains, the great wealth of ex-voto objects, personal thanksgiving offerings to the saints, in the form of intriguing explanatory paintings or objects modeled in wax, paper, metal or wood; postcards with holy figures of various types; books of hours; reliquary; rosary beads; medals and much more.
The emergence of Catholic visual culture is almost paradoxical. The second commandment forbade the worship of idols. This might have paid for the use of religious imagery, but, as early as the seventh century, Pope Gregory I (“also known as Saint Gregory the Great”) formulated a clever and pragmatic defense of the image as an essential instrument. didactic: “For what writing conveys to those who can read, a picture conveys to the ignorant … a picture is like a lesson to men.” However, notes Ivanič, the whole issue remained controversial. Artists had to constantly cross the line between devotional object and idol.
In retrospect, you have to think, Gregor’s argument was a stroke of genius in terms of corporate strategy. The combination of pictorial instructions and visible display was a winner. It is not surprising, as Ivanič points out throughout, that Catholic visual culture continues to influence and influence the contemporary world on countless levels, from high fashion to pop.
If you’re already somewhat at home Catholic—if you were raised Catholic, say—you may be familiar with much of the territory she explores. Her “decoding” of Leonardo’s Last Supper, for example, reveals that … Jesus is surrounded by the 12 apostles. Other decodings are quite a bit more informative, to be fair. Anchoring her concerns so firmly in what is Catholic, she can appear indifferent to related issues, such as colonialism. No doubt Catholic visual culture flourished in Mexico, but at the Oaxaca Museum of Cultures a few years ago, I was strongly impressed that the richness and subtlety of the pre-Hispanic culture there gave way, with the arrival of the Spanish, to something close. in a Catholic theme park culture.
