Praxiteles

An example of Choir Tapestries in France: this time from the Cathedral of St Etienne in Toulouse depicting scenes from the life of St. Stephen to whom the Cathedral is dedicated:

Some more on Raphael’s Miracolous Draught of Fishes:

http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/r/raphael/6tapestr/index.html

And on the tapestries:

Leo X commissioned cartoons (drawings) from the painter Raphael in 1515, these to serve as patterns for the tapestries, and Raphael’s pictures showed scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul. Raphael was a brave choice, as tapestry design was traditionally the province of the Flemish artists (the actual weaving would be done in Brussels). Leo was to marry the aesthetics of the Italian Renaissance with the brilliance of the Flemish weavers.

Raphael drew cartoons for ten of the tapestries, with his pupils making a dozen more from their master’s sketches. Another five are of more recent vintage. The cartoons themselves were to become collectable, with seven of them being bought by Charles I of England (they now hang in the V&A Museum in London). The cartoons then went to the Brussels workshop of tapestry weaver Pieter van Aelst. These tapestries, woven in gold thread, silk and wool cost the Papacy 16,000 ducats in the early sixteenth century (the equivalent of some €3000 per tapestry). It was an astonishing sum, five times the amount Michelangelo received for the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Copies of the hangings can today be found around Europe, in Paris, Dresden, Loreto and Berlin inter alia. That said, tapestry, which was incredibly labour intensive and requiring expensive materials, was ranked above painting in the hierarchy of arts of the day.

The cartoons took on a life of their own though. Through the 1500s they were passed around the workshops of weavers in Brussels, with new commissions being made from them as their popularity grew. Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England (among others) commissioned tapestries – hence the presence of copies in so many European cities. And these templates themselves grew valuable. Charles I bought seven of the cartoons from a dealer in Genoa in 1623, paying the extraordinary fee of £300. They stayed in the Royal Collection, eventually being donated to what became the Victoria and Albert Museum by Queen Victoria.

On the left of the Galleria degli Arazzi, as you enter, are Raphael’s Brussels tapestries. On the right are a series woven at the Rome workshops of Barberini, these depicting scenes from the life of Maffeo Barberini, who was to become Pope Urban VIII. It’s only good fortune that they survive. Having originally hung in the Sistine Chapel, the tapestries were stolen during the Sack of Rome in 1527. Pope Julius III negotiated their return during the 1540s but, when Rome was occupied by the French in 1798, the tapestries were again stolen. Pius VII has to buy them back from a Genoese dealer in 1808. Battered, weakened but not destroyed, the ‘arazzi’ returned to their new home … where they have hung ever since.

Something from this week’s Tablet:

14 June 2008

New dawn for sacred art

Laura Gascoigne
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The announcement that the Vatican will be a major player at next year’s Venice Biennale marks the return of the Church as a patron of contemporary art, something it is uniquely able to do as long as it eschews the fads and foibles of today’s marketplace

At the 2005 Venice Biennale, the Church of San Lio hosted a small exhibition of contemporary religious art sponsored by the National Department for Ecclesiastical Cultural Heritage of the Italian Episcopal Conference. None of the Italian artists participating was internationally famous, and the event went unrecorded in the world’s press. Three years on and the Catholic Church is rolling out the big guns. Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, announced last month that the Vatican will have its own pavilion at the fifty-third International Art Exhibition next year.

This is a long way from 1954, when L’Osservatore Romano denounced the Biennale as a symptom of “the breakdown of art in modern times”. Now we have Archbishop Ravasi telling the press: “Venice is a showcase for all the big countries in the world and the Holy See would like to be there too. We’re trying to get the best of international artists on our side who can create new works with a religious or spiritual subject”.

Actually, this is not a bolt from the blue. There has long been a feeling abroad in the Holy See that the Church, once the greatest sponsor of art in Europe, should make its peace with contemporary practitioners. Indeed, the first move towards acceptance was made as early as 1947 when Pius XII’s encyclical Mediator Dei acknowledged that sacred art, while remaining reverential, should “still reflect the spirit of our time”. In the 1960s, the modern-art-loving Paul VI went further, reinstating the Vatican tradition of art collecting; since his reign, more than 500 contemporary works have entered the Vatican Museum.

But the present discussion is not about art in museums; it’s about art in churches. With the Vatican also planning participation in this autumn’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, it appears to be announcing a new post-modern era of church patronage, in which cutting-edge ecclesiastical buildings such as Renzo Piano’s Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in Foggia will be filled with equally cutting-edge art. If so, it’s a welcome change of direction after a century of half-baked modernism that must surely mark the nadir of ecclesiastical art. The only question is, why suddenly now? Maybe the Vatican is tired of hearing art galleries hailed as the new churches and gallery-going as the new form of Sunday worship, and feels that it’s time to snatch the initiative back.

In the field of architecture, the global race is on to build ever grander temples to the arts, with Abu Dhabi currently out in front after commissioning a constellation of architecture stars to turn Saadiyat Island into a place of cultural pilgrimage. The Vatican may quite reasonably be wondering why the Devil should have all the best buildings. But what applies in architecture doesn’t necessarily apply in art. The services of the world’s most prominent architects are essential for the realisation of large-scale projects, which only they have the resources to tackle. But great art can be created by unknown artists in a space no bigger than Van Gogh’s bedroom. So when Archbishop Ravasi says, “We are looking for world-famous people,” you have to ask why.

The Church has reason to feel cheated in the contemporary art stakes when several leading artists have based their success on the exploitation of Christian imagery. In Britain, Damien Hirst has made a killing out of Catholic iconography and the Chapman Brothers are doing nicely too, with their latest vision of hell on show at the White Cube gallery in St James’s, London, and their contemporary take on the Book of Revelations to be revealed later this year. Theirs are not names, thankfully, on the Vatican’s wish list, said to include Anish Kapoor and Bill Viola – artists who make meditative works conducive to spiritual contemplation.

Still, the emphasis on world fame is a little worrying, suggesting that the Vatican, after years of sitting on the sidelines watching artists achieve fame on the back of Christianity, feels its turn has come to hitch a ride on their coat-tails. Either that, or it believes that by siting works by world-famous artists in churches, it will pull in the Sunday gallery-going crowd. But if that crowd is attracted by fame, it will move on to a different venue the Sunday after.

The Church does not need to court fame; it is famous enough. Nor does it need to worry about achieving returns on its art investments. Unlike public galleries, the pontifical committee tasked with selecting artists needn’t justify its choices on financial grounds; it can apply an alternative scale of spiritual values. It is in the privileged and enviable position of being able to ignore the art-world tipsters, and to back outsiders. So instead of dipping a toe in the shallow end of superficial reputation, it should give itself time to explore the depths. It should also cast its net wide. As St Martin-in-the-Fields proved with two recent works commissioned from non-Christian artists – a crib from Japan’s Tomoaki Suzuki and a window from the Iran-born Shirazeh Houshiary – outsiders can bring a new spiritual energy to familiar genres.

There is also a distinction to be made between art on spiritual subjects and spiritual art. As White Cube’s exhibitions director, Tim Marlow, pointed out in last week’s Independent on Sunday, contemporary artists who use religious iconography often do it “in a critical and questioning manner”. He wondered, with reason, “whether the Church can commission work that is both provocative and questioning”. Yet if the Church excludes the provocative and questioning, it will find its pool of famous artists very small. In our media-led society, artists who question and provoke rise to greater prominence than quiet seekers after spiritual truth.

Prominence, moreover, comes at a price. Aware of this, the Vatican has let it be known that it is seeking wealthy patrons to sponsor artworks for churches. This is a strategy that could lead it into murky waters. The art world has changed a lot since the Renaissance. The great art patrons of the past who paid for the construction and decoration of Catholic churches may have gained in personal glory, but not in wealth. These days, however, a patron who sponsors an artwork for display in a church gains access to a prestigious showcase that can enhance the artist’s stature and market value. If the patron collected or dealt in the artist’s work, the Church could become a pawn in an art-market game.

But there’s a better reason why the Vatican should forget fame, follow its spiritual instincts and take its search for artists out to the highways and hedges. With the galloping commercialisation of contemporary art, there’s a crying need for independent patrons who take the long view and are not in the market to make a quick buck. The Church could be just such a patron, championing the cause of a spiritual, slow-burning art, an art designed not for provocation or instant gratification but for contemplation – an art, like the great church art of the past, made to last.

The Church’s new dialogue with contemporary art could be a marriage made in heaven. But marriages made in a hurry – or for the sake of fame – don’t last. Fortunately, in our fast-paced world, the Church is one institution that can take its time.

And most importantly, how the Altar functions; how the steps are used by th various ministers; and how the decorations on the floor are use to mark the distribution of the minsiters during the various parts of the Mass.

Yesterday’s Solemn Pontifical mass at Westminster Cathedral affords a rare opportunity to see just how Bentley’s great masterpiece was intended to function – i.e. according to the Missal of 1570.

Here we see the sanctuary cleared of its usual clutter. Mercifully, it has managed to escape the vandalis and iconoclasm of which we have already seen so many examples.

The famous set of 10 tapieteris traditionally known as the Acts of the Apostles was commissioned by Pope Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici, the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent) in 1515 to be woven in Brussels from designs by Raphael and was first displayed in 1519 in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. “The Venetian connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel notedthat they were considered one of the finest things of their kind that had ever been made, surpassing the tapestries in Julius II’s `anticamera,’ those woven for the Gonzaga from designs by Mantegna, and those made for the king of Naples (all long since lost, together with any knowledge of their appearance and origins.) The Acts embodied an iconographic program that was intended to complement the existing decorations in the Sistine Chapel and to celebrate Leo as Christ’s representative on earth. Raphael conceived this scheme as a vast woven fresco incorporating lifesize figures acting in fully realized illusionistic settings. Although a number of earlier designs had included modest attempts in this respect, the scale, drama, artistry, and status of Raphael’s achievement took tapestry design in a whole new direction. Through the medium of engraved and woven copies, the Acts were among the most effective ambassadors of the Italian High Renaissance style in northern Europe in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and through their influence on the Netherlandish artists such as Bernaert van Orley and Pieter Coecke van Aelst, they fundamentally altered the subsequent development of Netherlandish tapestry design.”

At the time of Leo’s succession as Pope, the upper walls of the Sistine Chapel were filled with frescoes depicting the lives of Christ and Moses by such artists as Perugino, Botticelli, Signorelli and Ghirlandaio. “The lower register was decorated with fictive hangings brocaded with the della Rovere arms of Sixtus IV. The latest and most splendid addition was the ceiling frescoes of the Sibyls, Prophets, and scenes of Genesis that Michelangelo had executed at Julius II’s behest between 1508 and 1512. The forty-seven tapestries in use in the Sistine Chapel before the arrival of the Acts set are listed in the inventory of 1518. Twenty of these pieces depicted scenes of the Passion, but they were evidently not a unified set. The other twenty-seven tapestries comprised four groups of `diverse histories.’ However they were hung, the effect of these heterogeneous elements must have lacked uniformity, in contrast to some of the large commissioned sets that Leo could have encountered during his travels in northern Europe. Raphael (1483-1520) was at the height of his career when Leo commissioned the Sistine Chapel cartoons from him. Summoned to Rome by Julius II in 1508, Raphael was placed in charge of the fresco decorations of the papal apartments in the Vatican, a task that occupied him, along with many other projects, for the remaining twelve years of his life. The Stanza della Segnatura was painted between 1508 and 1512, and it shows the influence of Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel in its later stages. The artist then turned to the Stanza d’Eliodoro (1512-13). Incorporating heroic figures in dramatic movement in the foreground of clearly articulated perspectival spaces, the compositions of the Expulsion of Heliodorus and the Repulse of Attila marked a new physicality and dynamism in Raphael’s work. With the completion of this room, he had established himself as one of the leading artists in Rome, and the esteem in which he was held is reflected in the proposal made by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi, called Bibbiena, papal treasurer under Leo X, that Raphael should marry his niece (an offer that Raphael hesitated to accept, Vasari tells us, because of the possibility that the pope might make him a cardinal). Raphael’s stature was enhanced in April, 1514 when, following Bramante’s death, Leo appointed him one of the three architects of Saint Peter’s. The paint [on the cartoon drawings for the tapestries] appears to have been applied relatively thickly rather than in the more transparent washes that were traditional in Netherlandish production since at least the mid-fifteenth century and that continued to be used throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. This may reflect no more than Raphael’s unfamiliarity with the preparation of tapestry cartoons, but it may also have been determined in part by his anticipation of their ultimate destiny. Since it was not unknown for patrons to repurchase the cartoons for particularly important commissions, Raphael and Leo may well have envisaged that these cartoons would return to Rome, where they could have been exhibited in the Sistine Chapel itself (as was the practice in a number of northern churches) or in another venue. Connoisseurs were also collecting cartoons by this date. The tapestries’ traditional title, the Acts of the Apostles, is in fact something of a misnomer because they include two events in Peter’s life, the Miraculous Draft of Fishes and the Charge to Peter, recorded in the Gospels and pivotal to his appointment as Christ’s vicar on earth. In thus celebrating the origins of the papacy, the tapestries paid implied tribute to the present incumbent. Lest anyone miss the point, the overall design incorporated in five of the lower borders a fictive frieze of scenes from Leo’s life before his election, and in the side borders an allegorical celebration of his virtù. As such, it is the first extant tapestry design in which the borders illustrate a subsidiary iconography related to the principal theme. The wide lower borders also served the formal function of raising the main scenes to a level where they could be seen and appreciated by a seated congregation.

“In general,” the catalogue continued, “the [Raphael] tapestries have a sober, simplified character that contrasts with the elegance and refinement of Raphael’s Stanze frescoes and his paintings at the time. Almost all the protagonists are men, and much of the drama is communicated by expansive rhetorical gestures, in which the individuals point to one another or express their emotions with open mouths and outstretched arms. The argument that this reflects Raphael’s attempt to solve the problem of realizing painterly compositions in tapestry is unconvincing; in fact, certain scenes, such as the Conversion of Saul, do embody dramatic action or complex illusionistic effects (for example, the reflections in the water in the Miraculous Draft of Fishes). It seems more probable, therefore, that the monumentality of the designs was calculated to correspond to the simplicity of the tests they illustrate and to their interpretation in terms of what Alberti had defined as the highest form of painting, istoria, or history painting, in which he recommended that the number of actors should be limited as in ancient tragedies. Underlying such a motivation may have been Raphael’s wish to ensure the clarity of his images and their emotional impact from a distance, reflecting the concepts of enargeia (“an elevated clarity or vividness of expression”) and energeia (“emphasis or force of detailwhich tends towards hyperbole”) current in Renaissance rhetoric and poetics

The Brussels weavers made some changes to Raphael’s designs and that a few other versions were made, one, for example, for Henry VIII, and another for Francis I, king of France: “Such deviations from the cartoons are relatively minor in comparison with the weavers’ fidelity to them as a wholeWriting some years later, Vasari commented: `This work was executed so marvelously, that it arouses astonishment in whoever beholds it, wondering how it could have been possible to weave the hair and beards in such detail, and to give softness to the flesh with mere threads, and it is truly rather a miracle than the work of human art, seeing that in these tapestries are animals, water, and buildings, all made in such a way that they seem to be not woven, but really wrought with the brush.’ Standing in front of the tapestries today, we need to remember that their modern appearance is severely compromised by the passage of almost five hundred years. The colors have faded, the metallic thread is tarnished, the silks have lost their sheen, the wool has been abraded, and the uniformity of the surface has been disrupted by generations of repairs. An effort of imagination is required in order to grasp the original impact of these masterpieces of tapestry art.”

Intriguingly, while 16 tapestries were initially ordered, only ten were delivered and that their varying dimensions and the light sources indicated by the shadows on the fictive borders suggest they were designed for specific locations in the chapel, which over the years has undergone numerous physical changes.

“The Conversion of Saul, is “remarkable for its depiction of intense action; men and wheeling horses rush toward or away from the fallen figure of Saul in a dynamic composition that was absolutely revolutionary for tapestry at the time.

The one in the picture features the miraculous draught of fishes.

@shaun wrote:

Praxiteles, that church in Malta is really something else, those red drapes are so sensuous and extraordinary, something which is hard to find in an Irish church.

Reminds me a little bit of an Orthodox church.

Shaun, do not forget that one of the objects of baroque church iconography and decoration is to appeal not only to the intellect but also to the senses in order to evoke a religious response. You might say that the baroque approach is to appeal to the enire human being in all dimensions so as to arrive at a religious response. This, by the way, was also an integral part of the Jesuit educational system -when the Jesuits stuill had an educational system. Its success in re-Catholicizing many parts of Germany in the late 16th and 17th centuries cannot be underestimated.(And by Germany here, I also include the Low Countries).

This is why denuding baroque churches of their decorating and fittings effectively cripples a good part of their religious appeal, purpose and function. Can you immagine, for instance, the effect that covering over three-quarters of a painting by Murillo or Rubens or Van Dyck would have on the process of evoking a religious response?

The Church of the Immaculate Conception at Cospicua, Malta

I do know that similar type hangings were used in Maynooth College for the Corpus Christi Procession and am certain they were used as late as 1978. In the Maynooth case, the hangings were used for the outdoor altar of benediction erected at the centre of Pugin’s St. Patrick’s buildings.

They certanly are exuberant. They are made up in the form of an heraldic “Pavillion d’Etat” which you is to be seen on many of the coats of arms of the German Princes. Let me look for an example.