Sacred Art 101 (1 of 4): Terms and Framework
Introduction
I founded Goretti Fine Art because of my belief in the power of sacred painting to touch the heart.
I believe in the power of sacred painting to touch the human heart and nourish the human soul. Anyone who has been lulled into deeper union with God through meditation on a holy icon, or walked into a church and been transfixed by a breathtaking fresco, knows this power—a power, which, at its best, conveys truth and inspires to goodness through a revelation of transcendent beauty.
No doubt many readers have also encountered well-meaning religious paintings that do none of these. Perhaps you’ve been mildly creeped out by a kitschy prayer card (you know, the one with the sappy gaze from a pastel Christ…). Maybe you've felt deeply unsettled by a hideous multimedia display—an altarpiece?—in the sanctuary of a local parish, its stylistic core lying somewhere in the nebulous intersection between post-conciliar Neo-Gothic and twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism (if it makes you feel better, it was probably meant to be hideous and intended to unsettle).
If you have had these experiences, you are not alone. We are living in an era of unprecedented diversity in terms of the types of Christian art we encounter in our worship spaces, and all of it—the good, the bad, and the ugly—reminds us of the impact, whether positive or negative, that this sort of imagery can have on our spiritual vitality. The diversity is not itself a problem, but it is a symptom of a deep confusion in our modern culture as to the meaning and purpose of religious sacred art.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise, given that our modern culture struggles to reconcile itself to religious belief in general and lacks a conception of the sacred in particular. In light of this pervasive confusion, I firmly believe that to produce high-quality Christian art that consistently achieves its proper ends requires a return to the basics. Specifically, what is sacred art, and how is it distinguished in form, content, and purpose from other types of creative expression?
A Basic Framework
Answering this question starts, like everything else in the Christian worldview, with the Incarnation. The Incarnation means, among other things, that material creation is ennobled and can serve as a vehicle for encountering God. As a result of this sacramental perspective, the mainstream of Christian visual art throughout history has been fundamentally representational.
It is true that recurring persecutions in the Church’s early years often required the limiting of visual expression to obscure symbolism. There have also been occasional waves of iconoclasm, not to mention twentieth-century fads that reject continuity with past conventions. Still, as a general rule, the broad trajectory of artwork inspired by the traditional Christian cosmology has acknowledged the importance of the sensible in leading to the Divine.
For this reason, understanding Christian art, as well as what makes certain types of art appropriate for various liturgical, sacred, or other religious contexts, requires an appreciation of the different forms that representational artwork can take.
Historical artwork, such as my 2013 painting Charge of the Three Red Coats, can be evaluated on the related but distinct metrics of Realism, Accuracy, and Authenticity.
Having spent much of my career in the realm of historical art, I became accustomed to the subtle distinctions applicable to that field of representationalism. Specifically, one could differentiate among the Realism, Accuracy, and Authenticity of a painting depicting a historical subject.
I propose that an analogous trio of terms (though with rather different meanings) applies to representational religious paintings. For this field, I would describe the relevant metrics as Realism, Naturalism, and Illusionism, along with their respective opposites, Idealization, Non-naturalism, and Stylization.
It is important to note that there is no consensus among art historians as to the exact definitions of these terms, not only across but even within genres. This is widely acknowledged in art-critical publications, and, even when writers are conscientious about offering definitions, those definitions are often so convoluted as to serve the cause of confusion rather than clarity.
In the absence of a consistent standard, the best that I can do is to be clear about how I intend to use these terms. While my approach is at least broadly consistent with their accepted meanings, others might use some of these words differently or even interchangeably. Fortunately, I am striving for conceptual clarity, and at the end of the day the underlying concepts are more important than the precise terminology.
Subject vs. Style
An initial distinction which is important to keep in mind is between subject matter and style. For example, both Pablo Picasso’s Woman with a Book and Svetlin Velinov’s Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith depict humanoid figures with proportions that are highly distorted with respect to those of real people. It is clear, however, that Picasso’s subject is our own universe of everyday experience, represented in a distorted and fragmented style, whereas Velinov’s subject is a grotesque creature, represented in a life-like style.
This difference is critically important for appreciating the differing purposes and appropriate uses of the two paintings. Velinov is trying to give the viewer a sense for what it would be like actually to see such an unnatural figure, whereas Picasso is trying to give us a perspective on natural figures that transcends what it is like actually to see them. Velinov is inviting us to imagine another universe, while Picasso is inviting us to move beyond literal sense perception of this universe.
These differing purposes translate into differing uses. The Velinov piece would be appropriate as a work of concept art for a film or game studio. By contrast, the Picasso painting, conspicuously hung on the wall of a living room or office, might better advertise its owner’s sophistication and modern sensibility.
Categories of Subject Matter
The Picasso vs. Velinov example above helps us to define the different possible categories of subject matter.
The subject of Picasso’s Woman with a Book belongs comfortably in the natural world of our sensible universe. Paintings that focus on such material are said to be Naturalistic.
All other subject matter falls into a broad category of Non-natural material. This super-category can itself be subdivided into Supernatural and Unnatural. An artist painting Supernatural elements is trying to make intelligible to the viewer cosmological truths which are invisible to literal sight.
An Unnatural subject, by contrast, might either be a distortion of our own universe (a notion subtly distinct from that of our own universe depicted in a distorted style), as in Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque creations, or a portrayal of an alternative universe of the imagination, as in most works of the contemporary Fantasy Art genre.
Natural and Supernatural elements co-exist in The First Vision of St. Perpetua
While there is a sense in which these categories are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive as regards individual elements of a work of art, a given piece may combine elements from multiple categories. For example, our own depiction of St. Perpetua features a supernatural theophany in the upper register intersecting with the natural world of mundane experience in the lower, with the visionary herself bridging the two realms.
Categories of Style
The different styles that an artist may employ are independent of the choice of subject matter. While an infinite number of possible styles exist, we will define one and then all others in relation to it.
An Illusionistic style attempts to represent its subject in a manner that is faithful to the way the forms are or would be perceived by the human eye. This style is true to the natural world in terms of how light propagates and interacts with form (but, depending on the category of subject matter, not necessarily in terms of other physical properties of the forms themselves).
All other styles are said to be more or less Stylized to the degree that they depart from an Illusionistic approach to the subject matter. There are different names for different types of Stylization (Cubism, Impressionism, etc.), but all are characterized by the systematic distortion or simplification of form, color, or value, often according to established conventions, in order to achieve a particular effect. While various styles abound, all works can be placed on a spectrum from perfect trompe l’oeil Illusionism to Stylization so extreme as to be scarcely representational at all.
Categories of Mode
There is another, more subtle and less obvious, aspect of representational artwork which is distinct from subject matter and style as defined above but which is critically important to an assessment of religious art. It is the distinction between Realism and Idealism. Unlike the types of subject matter, these represent not discrete categories but two ends of a continuous spectrum.
Realistic depictions emphasize the particularity and imperfections of the world of everyday experience, while Idealization involves the removal of imperfections in order to conform to an archetype, resulting in a depiction that (depending on the subject matter) may appear natural but is somehow too perfect to be real. Another way of saying this is that it involves abstracting away from the particularity of the phenomenal world to reveal the universal form or essence of the thing depicted.
Because Realism and Idealism are opposites, a painting (or at least a given element) cannot be highly Realistic and highly Idealistic at the same time. Because these modes are orthogonal to the other attributes we are considering, however, it is possible for a work of art simultaneously to be highly Idealized and highly Naturalistic. Similarly, although many people use the term Realistic as synonymous with Illusionistic as defined above, under the terminology employed here it is quite possible for a painting to be both highly Realistic and highly Stylized at the same time.
What’s Next
We’ve now assembled a basic framework for analyzing the attributes that will be relevant to making sense of representational sacred artwork. Since this framework may be confusing in the abstract, in the next post we’ll apply the theory to some concrete examples.
Further Reading
The following articles provide a sense for the confusing diversity with which the terms defined in this post have been and are being used.