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From the Journal of Sacred Architecture
smilis est Homini Patrifamilias
THINKING ABOUT THE CHURCH AS “SACRAMENTAL SIGN”
by Steven J. Schloeder, appearing in Volume 24“. . . Like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Mt 13:52).
The attempts over the past century to find a contemporary architecture that can bear the weight of the Church’s sacramental vision have largely been unconvincing. Yet we are immediately confronted with both the Church’s own statement that she adopts no particular artistic style as her own (the Church and the Gospel are rightly above any irrevocable association with any secular or culturally contingent forms), as well as the notion that somehow the Holy Spirit will guide the Church and her theologians, architects, and artists to find meaningful expressions of the timeless truths of the Faith in any era or social circumstance. While appreciating that the Church does indeed have a cultural memory, a traditio both in the apostolic sense and in the natural sense, the Church is not hide-bound to the accidents of the artistic traditions.Given the difficulties in finding an appropriate modern language for church architecture, what can we positively propose as a direction for modern Catholic churches? Let us begin by recalling the guidelines given by the Vatican Fathers for the correct reformation of the liturgy: “In order that sound tradition be retained, and yet the way remain open to legitimate progress, a careful investigation—theological, historical, and pastoral—should always be made . . . and care must be taken that any new forms adopted should in some way grow organically from forms already existing.”1
Applied to ecclesial design, this passage certainly suggests that new churches be rooted to some degree in historical architectural precedent. Given the immense number of Catholic churches built over the centuries, one could hardly argue that this guideline would limit creativity. The Church also requests that “the general plan of the sacred building should be such that it reflects in some way the whole assembly.”2 That is, the spatial arrangements should express that the liturgy is “coherently and hierarchically ordered,” that the arrangement accommodates “the variety of ministries and the variety of actions according to the different parts of the celebration,” and that it both “allows the appropriate ordering of all the participants” and “facilitates each in the proper carrying out of his function.” The principle to be maintained is one of unity, expressive of the unity of the Body of Christ, while respecting that the body is comprised of different parts which have a hierarchical structure with a diversity of functions. The goal therefore is to create a church that expresses and manifests “a close and coherent unity that is clearly expressive of the unity of the entire holy people.”3 Only an arrangement derived from such an understanding can begin to address the iconographic concern of the building representing the Church as the Body of Christ and the People of God.
Cathedral in Anguo, Hebei Province, China (now destroyed). Photo from L’Arte Cristiana Nelle Missioni, Celso Costantini.We can also examine afresh the structural metaphors for the Church, both biblical and traditional, to explore new and relevant ways of expressing the ancient images of the Faith. Images such as the Temple, “the holy mountain” of the Psalms, the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation, the womb of the Virgin, the Upper Room, and the cruciform body of the Lord are but a few of the scriptural metaphors rich with meaning and architectural potential. Other recurring images show the Church as the ark of Noah or as a ship, an ancient image first invoked by Saint Peter (1 Pet 3:20), and thereafter by Justin Martyr, Cyprian, Augustine, Bede, both Hugh and Richard of St.-Victor, Antoninus, and Nicholas V. Only recently have we seen a recovery of these ideas, and notably the return to the basilican arrangement in lieu of the spate of theater-style seating that have been nearly universal since the 1960s. But this is not just a matter of furniture arrangement: the question still is a sacramental one — the church building as a sacred sign of the Ecclesia herself—and of how to approach church design in this sense.
The Church Universal and the Particular Churches
If we accept that the church building should be a sacred sign of the Ecclesia, what does this tell us about how to approach the design of a church? How do we account for a common way of thinking about church projects whether the building is a church or a cathedral or an abbey? Or whether it is for the Roman rite liturgy or the Syro-Malabar rite or the Maronites? Or whether it is being built in an arid country with mud bricks or in a cold and wet northern climate with steel frame construction, an insulated brick veneer, double glazed windows, and forced air ventilation? Can we speak of any commonality in thinking about the various styles and techniques of church buildings over the past two millennia such that we can understand the intrinsic connections between them as legitimate expressions of the Ecclesia and as truly sacramental architecture? Is it sufficient to build in the western European styles of architecture—classical, Romanesque, Gothic—even in missionary territories where these are alien forms? Should these particular styles be elevated to universal forms for Catholic architecture?
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Guangzhou, China. Photo by Steven Schloeder.Clearly as we saw in Sacrosanctum concilium, no. 123, the Church is adverse to claiming any mere style of architecture as encompassing of her mission or liturgical vision. Architectural styles, even those that are claimed as perennial such as the Greco-Roman classical tradition that was adopted in the Constantinian era, resurrected in the Renaissance, and recently recovered by the “New Palladians,” are all historically and culturally contingent. Any style is a particular expression of the technology and technical abilities, aesthetic values, cultural norms, cosmological worldview, symbolic understanding, and deeply held values of an age. While it may be inarguable that the historical styles that constitute a significant body of the architectural patrimony and cultural memory of the Church have far more commonality and consonance with the deep traditions of the Catholic faith than architectural modernism does, it would be a mistake to assume that any previous style of architecture can be universalized for the Church’s mission.
The idea that western cultural norms should be the basis for the Church’s missionary activity has been implicitly rejected in the Church’s missiology, as evinced by the various papal documents of the mid-twentieth century. Benedict XV’s Maximum illud called for the missionary to leave behind the cultural norms of his native homeland, and rather to seek only the spiritual good of the people to bring them to “their homeland in heaven.” He noted that “the Catholic Church is not an intruder in any country; nor is she alien to any people.”4 His successor, Pius XI, cautioned against immediately building churches in missionary territory that were “too sumptuous and costly as if you were erecting cathedrals and episcopal palaces for future dioceses.” Rather, the Church should seek to grow organically among the people, and it was deemed vital to cultivate a local clergy to develop an indigenous Church that best could proclaim the gospel to the particularities of the native culture.5
Celso Cardinal Costantini, who was appointed by Benedict XV as Apostolic Delegate to China and later the Secretary for the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, decried the imposition of western art forms in foreign lands and worked to promote authentic and distinctive Christian art forms that grew from the sensibilities of the native people who embraced the Faith. His goal was “to Christianize true indigenous art itself, that is, the natural productions of the genius of the various peoples.”6 He saw that “Western art in China is an error in style. It is an error to import European styles, Romanesque and Gothic, in China.” His concern was deeply evangelical; that “Western Christian art used in China gives the impression that Christianity is a western, not universal religion; the Church throughout its history has adopted and adapted to local art forms; Chinese art and culture provide many opportunities for adoption and adaptation.”7 Such adoption and adaptation was not limited to China, but promoted wherever the Church sought to proclaim the universal message of the gospel unfettered by the cultural constraints of the western architectural styles and artistic conventions. The particular Churches in India or Java or Japan could find a happy synthesis between the architectural patterns of their respective ritual and civic buildings (much as the early Church did with the Roman judicial basilica) and the universal elements that properly ought to govern the shape of the church: the liturgical, canonical, and theological principles of church building.8
Java Church. Photo from L’Arte Cristiana Nelle Missioni, Celso Costantini.This approach is instructive for us in considering the question of an appropriate architecture to serve and reflect both the Universal Church and the local particular Church. These terms of Catholic canon law can help us to appreciate the idea that a church building ought to serve iconically both the universal message of the Gospel and local presence of the Church in a particular region. By discriminating between the particular—e.g., the culturally, historically, site and project specific, and technologically contingent aspects of a church—and the universal (the sacramental signifiers, the liturgical arrangement, the canonical requirements, and the theological import) we can reconcile the vast array of Catholic churches built over the past two millennia, irrespective of the vast differences in era, rite, style, climate, technique, materials and methods, budget, local culture, or capabilities of the builders.
With this in mind we can suggest that any successful Catholic church building, as a “sacramental sign,” should simultaneously be an icon of the Universal Church and of the particular Church. It will be reflective of the Universal Church when it is properly informed by the Church’s sacramental tradition of building (the language of the Body, the Temple, the City, etc.), an authentic liturgical sensibility, due consideration of the Church’s canonical requirements for the church and the various parts therein, and respect for the iconographic conventions that inform good sacred art in service of the liturgy and the devotional lives of the faithful. As importantly, it will be reflective of the particular Church, the local Ecclesia and the specific parish community, when the design addresses the local and vernacular concerns of the project.
The myriad of issues such as site considerations, vernacular architecture, budgets, planning and zoning requirements, building code regulations, variable “tastes” of pastors and building committee members, what the parish community will support financially, and the artistic talent of the design team will all shape the final building significantly even if the “universal” aspects are all meticulously attended to. As we have noted previously, the most concise statement of the universal aspect—which informs the liturgical, canonical, and much of the historical architectural patrimony—is that the churches “should be truly worthy and beautiful and be signs and symbols of heavenly realities.”9 If the thoughts and aspiration of the architect and the parish client are such that the whole building, all the component parts that serve the liturgy, and both the ministerial priest and the baptismal priesthood of the lay faithful should be truly turned versus Deum per Jesus Christum, then the building might well hold its place in the continuum of good sacred architecture as an icon of the Universal Church manifested in the local Church. For this is what we are always about in church design: manifesting the Heavenly City, the Church Universal, here in our own home town.
Steven J. Schloeder, PhD, AIA, is an architect and theologian. His firm, Liturgical Environs PC, (http://www.liturgicalenvirons.com) specializes in Catholic church building projects across the United States. He may be contacted at steve@liturgicalenvirons.com.Endnotes
1 Vatican II, Sacrosanctum concilium (Dec. 4, 1963), no. 23.
2 General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Third Edition (2010) [= GIRM (2010)], no. 294.
3 ibid
4 Benedict XV, Maximum illud, (Nov. 30, 1919), nos. 16, 18, and 19.
5 Pius XI, Rerum Ecclesiae (Feb. 28, 1926), nos. 21 and 31.
6 Celso Cardinal Costantini, “Non vogliamo meticci nell’arte missionaria,” in Le Missioni cattoliche (1957), 25-26. Quoted in Sergio Ticozzi, “Celso Costantini’s Contribution to the Localization and Inculturation of the Church in China,” Tripod 28, no. 148 (Spring 2008): n. 17.
7 Celso Cardinal Costantini, “L’universalité de l’art chrétien,” Dossiers de la Commission synodale. Numéro special sur l’art chrétien chinois 5 (1932): 410-417.
8 See in Celso Cardinal Costantini, L’Arte Cristiana nelle Missioni (Vaticano: Tipographia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1940), 220, 259, and 282, inter alia, for examples of indigenous styles of Catholic churches that present dignified and locally relevant architectural forms detached from the western tradition.
9 GIRM (2010), no. 288.Cram & Ferguson Architects: An American Tradition
@Fearg wrote:
back by next summer apparently..
good.
But I hear that glass restoration techniques rejected at St. Kevin’s Harrington Street as inappropriate conservation methods are to be or have been applied to the glass in St Catherine’s Meath Street. Any line on this saga?
@StephenC wrote:
Sorry to intrude on this hallow’d ground. However this link might interest lovers of the nation’s churches. Some images of the newly refurbished and reopened St Catherine’s Church on Meath Street in Dublin.
http://www.frg.ie/local-news/gallery-images-of-newly-refurbished-st-catherines-church/
(tipps hat…leaves)
This is certainly good news. Does anyone know if the the stained galss window in the sanctuary is to return or not?
From the Spectator
God in a stained glass window
‘We don’t realise how incredible life is,’ says Patrick Reyntiens, whose work for churches up and down the country has finally been documented in a magisterial book.Andrew Lambirth 14 December 2013
Writing about Graham Sutherland in 1950, the critic Robert Melville observed: ‘When one looks at a picture one finds oneself over the frontier or one doesn’t. Criticism has no power of making converts to an experience which occurs without the intervention of reason … Criticism considers the sensitive flesh of the image and discovers its spiritual stature: indeed, unless we pursue the meaning of the image as language, painting may well fall silent and rest content in the pride of its flesh.’
This quotation is of relevance here for several reasons: because one of my principal roles as a writer is to function as an art critic; because Melville rightly identifies the limitations of criticism; and because he also points out criticism’s ability to uncover the spiritual stature of a work of art. I see my brief as a critic primarily as a purveyor of information, a sort of animated signpost, attempting to point out something that readers should then judge for themselves. I hope my enthusiasm or censure will inspire others to look and think independently. It is the act of looking at art — of sharing in this fundamental but highly sophisticated activity — that means most to me.
At this time of year, my thoughts turn invariably to the spiritual in an attempt to counteract the avalanche of materialism impossible to avoid now in a British Christmas. Art can help, for art is not just about pretty pictures to break up the wallpaper, it is also about our relationship to each other and to the world we inhabit, and about the spiritual dimension that exists behind surface appearances. It is food for the soul as well as for the eyes, and nowhere is this more evident than in the art of stained glass.
The leading practitioner of stained glass in this country is Patrick Reyntiens. Of Belgian extraction, Reyntiens was born in London, at 63 Cadogan Square, 88 years ago. He has spoken of the slightly raffish quality of the area, which appealed to him: ‘far more stimulating than the more aristocratic streets and squares of Belgravia’. In the 1920s and 30s, Arnold Bennett lived four doors up, and, whenever she could, Reyntiens’s nanny used to push the pram containing young Patrick into the novelist’s legs ‘by mistake on purpose’ she loathed him so much. And every night at 6 p.m. Nanny read Dickens for half an hour to the young boy, which gave him his great enthusiasm for reading. (He has subsequently amassed a substantial library.)
Reyntiens grew up wanting to be an artist, and after Ampleforth he studied at Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art and then Edinburgh College of Art. At Edinburgh he met his future wife Anne Bruce (1927–2006), herself a painter of considerable distinction. Apart from five years in the Army during the war, Reyntiens has devoted his life to being an artist, but has spent most of his energies on stained glass. He needed a job because he wanted to get married, and a position was vacant as assistant to the stained-glass maestro Eddie Nuttgens (1892–1982), friend and neighbour of Eric Gill at Piggotts Hill, near High Wycombe. Reyntiens took the job and has never looked back.
He is most famous for his 35-year collaboration with John Piper, with whom he worked on such prestigious commissions as the Baptistery Window at Coventry Cathedral (1957–61), and the lantern tower of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (1963–7), for which he is jointly credited as designer. The relationship between the two men was not simply that of artist and technical adviser, but a more equal collaborative undertaking. Reyntiens likens the activity to the co-operative and interpretative venture of music. For instance, it was Reyntiens who suggested, when Piper was a little at a loss for inspiration, that he should metaphorically throw a bomb into the middle of the Coventry Baptistery window and design a great explosion of light around it. Similarly Reyntiens’s input was crucial for the new Roman Catholic Cathedral in Liverpool. ‘I’d just been reading Dante,’ he says. ‘In the Purgatorio there’s a description of the Trinity as three great eyes of different colours winking at each other.’ Piper was intrigued if a little piqued. ‘It’s a pity Dante didn’t tell you what to do with the rest of the cathedral,’ he responded crisply.
The work with Piper has somewhat overshadowed Reyntiens’s individual creativity. He has worked extensively as a solo artist over the past half-century, designing and making stained glass for buildings up and down the country. At last this very substantial achievement has been fully documented in Libby Horner’s magisterial Patrick Reyntiens: Catalogue of Stained Glass (Sansom & Co, £60). The example illustrated here depicts the Virgin and Child, with attendant angels, in a three-light East window. It was designed, painted and made by Reyntiens in 1958–9 for St Mary’s, Hound Road, Netley Abbey, Southampton, a simple 13th-century church in the Early English style, described by Reyntiens as a ‘unique little building, intrinsically a powerhouse of spirituality and a venue for private prayer’. The commission was undertaken at the same time as he was working with Piper at Coventry, and Reyntiens considers it one of the best things he has ever done.
Pevsner, in his magisterial survey of the Buildings of England (Hampshire and the Isle of Wight), observed of this window that ‘the colouring bears only a partial relationship to the figures and is to a large extent composed as if the design were abstract. But the figures are strongly representational, with firm facial expressions and delicately composed hands and robes.’ The Virgin Mary is holding the infant Jesus, who opens his arms wide as if to bless or embrace the world. This gesture is immensely endearing, not to say moving, and is Reyntiens’s own interpretation rather than a standard item of traditional iconography in depictions of the Christ Child. He is not especially inspired by historical stained glass. He describes late 12th- and early 13th-century glass as being designed in ‘very pushy colours next to one another — exactly like Gilbert & George’ — though based on the look of the big flags emblazoned with armorial devices prevalent in the Middle Ages.
The colouration of the Hound window is mainly blue, mauve and green with touches of yellow and red, and the application of the paint on the glass is delicate — more like watercolour than oil in consistency. Reyntiens is a practising Roman Catholic and his strong faith is central to his life. Although Easter is the real high point of the Christian year, Christmas, he says, ‘gives an authority to the most important thing in your life — birth. The most amazing thing is our arriving in this whole situation.’ He gesticulates expressively with his hands. ‘I don’t know what beauty is really — except that in one way or another it is what we were all intended to experience. We don’t realise how incredible life is.’
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 December 2013
From the City Journal
Stephen Eide
The New York Public Library’s Uncertain Future
A proposed renovation threatens one of the world’s great research institutions.
No place does more for more New Yorkers”—so claims the New York Public Library. Unlike most institutional boasts, this one has merit, because the library has long balanced unparalleled excellence with remarkably open access. Serving Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island—Brooklyn and Queens have their own separate library systems—the New York Public Library operates one of the world’s premier research institutions and a circulating system of 87 branches. The library’s research holdings far surpass those of any other public library in the nation and of most universities; access to the collection has been as deep a source of pride for the library as the breadth and depth of the collection itself. But now the library is on the cusp of enacting the most radical change in its 120-year history: under the Central Library Plan, as it’s been called, the library will sell two major facilities in midtown Manhattan and use the proceeds, plus city funds—$350 million in all—to renovate the iconic Main Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, which would retain its research function while also becoming the system’s central circulating branch.
Critics have attacked the plan’s design and scope and the lack of public input in formulating it. The library insists, though, that the renovation is necessary. “This is about improving services for our users—the public,” says David Offensend, the library’s chief operating officer. That claim seems dubious, at least for researchers. Even under the brightest scenario, the likely result would be an institution marginally more cost-effective but significantly downgraded from the research standard it has set during its illustrious history.
By the late nineteenth century, New York had established itself as America’s cultural capital; the city lacked only a world-class library system, though modest lending libraries—some fee-based, others free—could be found throughout town. The privately funded Astor and Lenox research libraries owned serious public collections, but they were little used. In 1895, they consolidated their collections and, with a bequest from the estate of former New York governor Samuel Tilden—who left some of his fortune for the purpose—formed a new research institution dedicated equally to intellectual excellence and public access. The library’s official name was The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, which it remains today. City government provided land on the site of an obsolete reservoir between 40th and 42nd Streets, close to the old Grand Central Depot and near the planned Penn Station at 33rd Street and 7th Avenue, completed in 1910.
The Main Building’s classical design was the work of Carrère and Hastings, an architectural firm whose principals had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The structure took 12 years and $9 million to build, and it incorporated 14 varieties of marble—including some from the same Greek quarry that supplied the Parthenon. The building’s unique features include the pink-marble lions, named Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia during the Great Depression, which guard the front portico; the third floor’s majestic Rose Main Reading Room; and the seven stories and 88 miles of cast-iron and steel bookshelves, closed to the public, which occupy most of the building’s west side and hold up the Rose Main Reading Room. These are “the stacks,” regarded as an engineering marvel in their day—even appearing on a 1911 cover of Scientific American.
The library began incorporating independent lending libraries into its organization in 1901. Circulating operations expanded vastly when Andrew Carnegie donated $5.2 million to build 65 branches across the city. The cost of building the average branch library in the early twentieth century was $80,000, or about $2.2 million in today’s dollars. Carrère and Hastings designed 14 Carnegie branches in New York City. City government agreed to fund the branches’ operating costs (it had pledged capital assistance only for the main research library). Ever since, the branches have been an integral part of the civic and cultural life within New York neighborhoods. “The local branches of the New York Public Library served ‘everybody“ but did not try to acquire ‘everything,’ ” writes library historian Phyllis Dain. “Essentially popular lending libraries of limited size (compared to the research libraries’ huge holdings), they focused on the people in their communities.”
The research library, meanwhile, quickly became one of the best in the world, in the same class as France’s Bibliothèque Nationale and the British Museum. Whole books have been written about the library’s collection, which now boasts some 45 million items (51 million counting the branch holdings), including a Gutenberg Bible and a 1623 Shakespeare First Folio from the Astor and Tilden libraries. The great libraries of the past were dedicated to preserving particular traditions, whether nationalistic or religious. The New York Public Library, Dain writes, did aspire to collect everything, “the obscure and unorthodox as well as the acclaimed and conventional, and in a variety of formats,” from as many traditions as possible. Of greatest value to researchers are the many special collections, such as the papers of Robert Moses and H. L. Mencken; the archives of The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Bolshevik propaganda, along with thousands of volumes from the personal libraries of the deposed Russian royal family; nineteenth-century dime-store novels; eighteenth-century playbills; and much more. Though the research collection does not circulate, anyone can make use of it. Former library president Vartan Gregorian sees the institution’s mission as evidence that “democracy and excellence are not mutually exclusive; they are compatible.”
Barely a decade into its existence, the library began running out of space in the Main Building. In 1933, it bought a building on 25th Street to serve as an annex. About 30 years later, it sold off the original annex and purchased another building on West 43rd Street, which recently sold for $45 million. Today, in addition to the Main Building in midtown Manhattan, the library’s research operations include the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center (opened in 1965), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (formally designated as a research library in 1972, though it grew out of a Carnegie branch built in 1904), and the Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL, opened in 1996). The truth is, it doesn’t make much sense to house a great research library in midtown, where space is at a premium—at least not in a building so revered as to prohibit demolishing or substantially remodeling it for functional reasons. For over a decade—before the Central Library Plan was developed—the library has kept a significant share of its books off-site at a Princeton, New Jersey, storage facility known as the Research Collection and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP), which it shares with the Columbia and Princeton university libraries. Patrons must ask for items in advance, and the library promises to furnish them within one business day if requested before 2:30 PM, a goal that it claims to meet 85 percent of the time.
Funding has also been an ongoing concern. From the outset, the Main Building was used well beyond its intended capacity. Some officials argued that the library was a victim of a “tragedy of the commons.” No one had an obligation to pay for its services, so it was over-patronized. Locals and nonlocals, businesses, writers, and the academic community—everyone used it. (True, for 25 years, the library banned high school students from using the Main Building without special permission, but the policy was largely flouted.) The library also found itself straining to keep up with acquisitions. Global output of published materials exploded throughout the twentieth century, and the costs of keeping up became exorbitant.
These pressures, combined with inflation and New York City’s financial struggles, created an ongoing fiscal crisis for the library that began in the mid-sixties and lasted until about 1980. Officials slashed hours at the Main Building from 87 to 43 a week, imposed furloughs and hiring freezes, and deferred basic maintenance. Nor could the library escape the blight of midtown Manhattan in the seventies. Located just a few blocks east of the red-light district that was Times Square in those days, the Main Building overlooked an open-air drug market in Bryant Park, its backyard. The wall facing Bryant Park was sometimes called “New York’s longest urinal.”
To ease the money crisis, the library began to diversify its revenues, securing additional financial support from New York State and the federal government, and expanding its donor base from 3,000 supporters in the early seventies to more than 40,000 a decade later. The new funding helped stabilize the library’s finances and set the stage for future growth. The real renaissance began with Gregorian, the former University of Pennsylvania president who led the library from 1981 to 1989 and forged a reputation as one of New York’s great fund-raisers. The Campaign for the Public Library, conceived by Gregorian and the library’s board of directors, raised more than $300 million from private and public sources in less than five years.
Thanks to Gregorian, the Main Building received its first major restoration. The library installed a temperature- and humidity-control system in the stacks, spent $1 million to dust the 88 miles of bookshelves—something that hadn’t been done in 75 years—added a new book-storage facility under Bryant Park, and refurbished much of the interior, including the third-floor reading room, which was duly renamed the Rose Main Reading Room in honor of its benefactors, the Rose family. The library’s endowment swelled from $75 million in 1981 to $400 million by the late nineties. The neighborhood branches benefited, too, with new facilities, renovations of old Carnegie libraries, and a few relocations. Many of the renovations came through the library’s innovative Adopt a Branch program, which linked neglected, low-profile branches with private and public funding sources.
Not every move succeeded. Library officials lavished $100 million on the Science, Industry and Business Library, housed in the former B. Altman department store on 34th Street and Madison Avenue, which it now plans to sell off, less than 20 years after it opened. Though the library claims not to be dissatisfied with the level of usage at SIBL, the facility clearly did not become what it was projected to be: the “vibrant center of information about business and science designed to serve the city and the nation . . . [that] contributes significantly to building the skills of the region’s work force, empowering immigrants through information and technology, and undergirding economic development in New York.”
But a larger concern than SIBL’s underperformance was what to do about the Mid-Manhattan central circulating branch. Located kitty-corner to the Main Building in another former department store (an escalator still operates between the first and second floors), Mid-Manhattan is one of the country’s most heavily trafficked public libraries. The library purchased the building in 1961, began operating some functions out of it in the late sixties, and formally opened it to the public in 1982, but somehow never got around to giving it a proper renovation. Shabby and smelly, Mid-Manhattan is to the Main Building what modern Penn Station is to the old Penn Station.
Mid-Manhattan’s days became numbered in March 2008, when officials unveiled the Central Library Plan, along with news of a $100 million gift from financier Stephen Schwarzman. (Technically, the Main Building is now the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; unlike that of the Rose Main Reading Room, the new name has not caught on.) The plan proposes to demolish the Main Building’s stacks to make way for a new central circulating branch, which will replace Mid-Manhattan. Financing would come from the sale of Mid-Manhattan and SIBL, which library officials estimate will net about $200 million, on top of $150 million in funding from the city that the library secured in 2011. The trustees selected for the renovation the well-known British architect Norman Foster, who had completed modern additions to historic buildings such as the British Museum and the Reichstag.
Once fully implemented, the Central Library Plan will enhance overall research services, officials contend, by adding study space in the Main Building (some rooms now closed to the public will be opened for this purpose) and maintaining superior preservation conditions for the collection at ReCAP and Bryant Park (library officials say that temperature and humidity conditions in the stacks still fluctuate too much, despite the massive environmental-control upgrade implemented in the eighties). As they see it, the plan will also deliver considerable cost efficiencies.
Saving money is something that the library needs to do. Many New Yorkers don’t realize that the New York Public Library is not a city-run institution like the police department or the public schools but a nonprofit organization that receives government subsidies along with private donations and grants. One board and central administration oversees both branch and research operations, though funding arrangements differ for each. Public funds, mostly from the city, support 85 percent of branch operations but only 30 percent of research operations. The remainder comes from private sources. The library’s fiscal 2012 audit puts the value of its endowment at close to $900 million—a massive sum for a cultural institution but less impressive when measured against many private universities’ endowments.
When it announced the Central Library Plan five years ago, the library was riding high from the $100 million Schwarzman gift and the Wall Street boom. The endowment grew more than 60 percent from fiscal 2003 until the market crash, but the ensuing years of recession, along with overextended city budgets, took a toll. Since 2008, the library has cut its workforce by 37 percent at the branches, reduced branch hours, deferred planned maintenance, and gotten along with a smaller acquisition budget. These cuts are an inevitable consequence of public workers’ spiraling retirement and health-benefit costs, which drain municipal resources in New York and around the nation. After paying their employee costs and providing for schools and public safety, cities have less and less left over for libraries. And the library has its own pension problem. Though library employees technically work for a private nonprofit, all full-timers participate in the New York State and Local Employees’ Retirement System. Library pension costs came to $14.6 million in the 2012 fiscal year, up from $10.8 million five years earlier—a 35 percent increase. (Given its funding responsibilities for branch operations and some research costs, the city winds up paying for most of those pensions.)
“We’re hemorrhaging,” library president Anthony Marx said at a 2012 forum. In fiscal year 2012, the library received about $10 million less in city support than it got four years earlier; funding from New York State declined by $9 million. On the capital side, the library estimates that its needs run into the hundreds of millions. Library officials claim that the Central Library Plan will improve their annual bottom line by $15 million; $7 million would come from operational efficiencies—it’s cheaper to operate one facility in midtown, rather than three—and the remainder from increasing the endowment by selling the buildings and boosting fund-raising (by attracting donors for the new Foster facility). Assuming no cost overruns, the Central Library Plan would allow the library to recoup much, but not all, of the recent city and state funding cuts.
But these are risky assumptions. The library touts its record of completing recent capital projects on time and on budget, but the Central Library Plan is orders of magnitude more complicated in engineering and architectural challenges. Library officials insist that taxpayers’ commitment won’t exceed the $150 million from the city treasury. But what happens if they’re wrong? Perhaps the library assumes that its well-heeled donors would cover any excessive costs. The Nation’s Scott Sherman has criticized the library’s recent track record in real-estate transactions, pointing out that the former Donnell branch on West 53rd Street sold in 2007 for just $59 million—the building’s penthouse alone is currently on the market for $60 million. (The library insists that it “ran a very competitive sales process with Donnell” and that the listing price for the penthouse ignores costs that the new owner is putting into the building.)
Whether the plan saves money or not, many worry—rightly—that it will undermine the library’s research tradition. The New York Public Library’s collection does not circulate; it must be used on-site. Under the new plan, more than 1 million fewer books will be available on-site, and 3 million fewer books than the library could keep on-site. Researchers will have to request materials at least a day in advance, making research more inconvenient. Often, while studying a source on the premises, researchers discover through a footnote that still another source is needed. They will put in a request for that additional source, just as always—only now, they’ll often have to wait a day to get it. The discovery process will no longer flow as naturally. To non-researchers, this may seem a petty matter, but ready access to the collection—not just the collection’s magnificence—is what has helped make the New York Public Library indispensable.
Further, combining research and branch services in the same facility amounts to administrative folly. The Rose Main Reading Room, which can accommodate about 650 people, operates on most days close to capacity. It works: users are generally quiet and respectful of one another. But what would be the effect of introducing thousands more users to the Main Building every day? Unless one assumes that the new Foster space, and additional research space within the Main Building, will be more attractive than the space in the Rose Main Reading Room, crowding is likely.
Library officials remind critics that the Main Building did, for a time, house some circulating operations, before these were transferred to Mid-Manhattan—thus establishing a historical precedent for branch functions in the Main Building. But branch libraries’ functions have changed dramatically over the past half-century. Mid-Manhattan boasts a uniquely strong collection for such a library, but it also doubles as a quasi-social-services provider, as do many local libraries around the country. “Although they are often thought of as cultural institutions,” argued a 2013 report by the Center for an Urban Future, a left-leaning New York think tank, “the reality is that the public libraries are a key component of the city’s human capital system.” In this view, New York’s public libraries—and the branches in particular—exist to provide underprivileged groups with vital services, such as computer-literacy classes, job-search assistance, and “safe havens” for at-risk youths.
Assuming that the library (as opposed to some other agency or nonprofit) should be charged with assisting disadvantaged New Yorkers, it doesn’t follow that doing so is compatible with giving maximum access to one of the world’s great research collections. Would anyone ask the same of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? In times of austerity, it’s generally a good idea for organizations to combine operations in the name of cost savings and enhanced efficiency. That’s not the case here. Some functions are simply at odds. As a petition signed by Salman Rushdie, Tom Stoppard, and hundreds of other scholars and writers puts it: “NYPL will lose its standing as a premier research institution . . . and become a busy social center where focused research is no longer the primary goal.”
Finally, the Central Library Plan’s architectural design, at least as presently formulated, is uninspiring. In December 2012, the library released “renderings” of Foster’s plans. Patrons would reach the new circulating branch by walking through the main portico to the back of the Main Building, eventually coming to a vast open space with several terraces and a view of Bryant Park. Compared with Mid-Manhattan, the new space looked like an improvement, but that wasn’t saying much. Given the hype and cost, the design appeared entirely unremarkable, as New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman noted—and other critics agreed. Stung by the criticism, the library sent Foster back to the drawing board. According to the Wall Street Journal, Foster’s new design, due sometime this autumn, will preserve “a significant portion” of the stacks and use them to hold books from the circulating library.
Responding to the research community’s complaints, the library obtained last year a grant from a trustee to enable a fuller build-out of book-storage space beneath Bryant Park, and it has agreed to provide an independent cost estimate for keeping the stacks in the Main Building while improving climate controls and refurbishing Mid-Manhattan, though it isn’t wavering from the Central Library Plan.
It should reconsider the plan. The New York Public Library is a great institution because of its research collection and its commitment to public access to that collection. Among Gotham’s institutions, some are better than their equivalents in other American cities, and some are just bigger. The branch library system, though valuable, may be likened to the New York Public Schools: it is primarily distinguished from other cities’ branch libraries by its enormous size. But the research library is uniquely excellent, like, say, the New York Police Department and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has no equal in other American cities. Scholarship, education, and our cultural inheritance would all suffer if it is diminished. Despite claims to the contrary, the Central Library Plan will do exactly that.
Research for this article was supported by the Brunie Fund for New York Journalism.
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Center for State and Local Leadership.
From Apollo Magazine
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[align=:15i0xtal]Bronze Blunders
ROBERT O'BYRNE[/align:15i0xtal]
Last Sunday in the County Mayo village of Cong, an Irish government minister unveiled a bronze statue commemorating John Ford’s 1952 piece of hokum The Quiet Man, much of which was filmed in the immediate area. A few days earlier another government minister had unveiled a bronze statue in Celbridge, County Kildare commemorating Arthur Guinness, founder of the well-known brewery, who grew up in the town.
Politicians are not as a rule renowned for their aesthetic sensibilities, which is just as well since both the works here cited can most generously be described as banal. Until recently we Irish were better known for destroying or deporting old statues than for erecting new ones: in Dublin alone the grievous losses include Grinling Gibbons’ equestrian statue of William III (blown up 1929) and John Van Nost the Younger’s equestrian statue of George II (blown up 1937) as well as Van Nost the Elder’s equestrian statue of George I (sold to Birmingham’s Barber Institute 1937).
Today however like Cadmus’ Spartoí fresh statues keep springing up around the country, the majority of them initiatives by local townspeople with funding provided by individuals and businesses; the current downturn in the national economy has led to a corresponding drop in public art commissions.
One is of course delighted artists are kept in employment and foundries in business. And the desire to pay tribute to a person or occasion of importance within the vicinity is understandable. Yet the standard of much work now appearing across the country ranges from poor to dreadful: it can be stated with confidence that neither Mark Rode nor Jarlath Daly, respectively responsible for the The Quiet Man and Arthur Guinness sculptures, will ever be judged equal to Gibbons or either of the Van Nosts.
At the moment popular taste prefers representational work, statues that look – albeit sometimes rather fuzzily – like their intended subjects. So, for example, sculpture raised to honour sportsmen (very in vogue) always shows them in action, lest we wonder why they are being honoured. An especially unimaginative bronze figure of Thin Lizzie’s Phil Lynott in central Dublin depicts the musician holding his guitar: incidentally it transpires Paul Daly, who made the piece in 2005, had never sculpted anything before.
Abstraction is out of favour, the last such large-scale work being the Spire on the capital’s O’Connell Street. This stands on the site of Nelson’s Pillar, a fine 121 foot high granite Doric column topped by a statue of the admiral. The pillar was detonated in March 1966 by the IRA as its own special contribution to events marking the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. The Spire meanwhile is a giant stainless steel knitting needle and leaves as lasting an impression on the spectator as does that implement.
Dublin City Council, which spent €4 million putting it up 10 years ago, entertained delusional hopes the Spire would become an icon in the same way as has the Eiffel Tower for Paris. In fact, the city already possesses a piece of sculpture with which it has become synonymous: Jeanne Rynhart’s truly abysmal 1988 statue commemorating someone who most likely never existed, Molly Malone. Sited at the lower end of retail thoroughfare Grafton Street, the figure’s pneumatic breasts propose Molly as more street walker than street trader. Yet the piece is wildly popular, with tourists forever pausing to be photographed beside the so-called Tart with the Cart.
What Ireland badly needs is its own equivalent of a fourth plinth, onto which all this bronze can be lowered and subjected to quality assessment. The only problem would be that work is being churned out at such speed space would soon become an issue.From Apollo Magazine
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Iconoclasm Today
MARTIN OLDHAM
It was an unhappy coincidence that the same week Tate Britain opened its new exhibition ‘Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm’, a controversial act of iconoclasm was taking place in Newport in South Wales. The Chartist Mural, a much-loved mosaic in the city centre, was demolished by Newport council to make way for a £100 million shopping development. In the exhibition, Tate presents iconoclasm as largely a historical phenomenon, but in doing so overlooks acts of image-breaking that are taking place all too frequently today both outside and inside the gallery.
The destruction of the Newport Chartist Mural has quickly become a political issue. Local protestors feel their democratic views have been brushed aside by a council more attentive to the commercial interests of the developers. The 35m-long mosaic, made in 1978 by Kenneth Budd, is of symbolic importance in this dispute, because it depicted a bloody confrontation that took place in 1839 between Newport Chartists – working class radicals who were campaigning for democratic reform – and government troops. Demolition of this image of popular resistance, in order to build a shopping centre, has not gone down well in the old socialist heartlands of South Wales.
The recent examples of ‘iconoclasm’ included in the Tate exhibition are timid by comparison. I found myself wishing for something more robust and provocative than the ‘exploratory and transformational practices’ producing ‘new works with new meanings’ offered at the end of the chronological hang.
Inevitably, this was going to be an exhibition characterised by absences. But some reference could usefully have been made to Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), for example. This work consisted of the concrete cast of the interior of an East London house, left behind as the solitary monument of a demolished Victorian terrace. Although House was extremely popular, attracting thousands of visitors, the local council didn’t like it. On the same day that Whiteread was awarded the Turner Prize for the work, the council ordered its destruction. The motivations behind this act of obliteration are hard to understand today, but seem to be more about control of public space, than aesthetic considerations.
Even harder to understand are attacks by individuals on artworks in public galleries. It is a shame that the Tate could not include its own Black on Maroon by Mark Rothko in the exhibition, but this painting is still undergoing costly conservation work following an act of vandalism in 2012. The assailant wrote his name and a slogan in black paint on the picture, later claiming that ‘art allows us to take what someone’s done and put a new message on it’, a pronouncement that uncomfortably chimes with the ‘new works with new meanings’ definition of contemporary iconoclasm being used in the Tate show.
Sadly, the Rothko is not an isolated example. In 2011, someone sprayed paint on Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf in the National Gallery, London. A newly commissioned portrait of the Queen by Ralph Heimans was defaced in a similar way in Westminster Abbey earlier this year, by someone campaigning for equal parenting rights for fathers.
It is easy to dismiss such incidents as the isolated actions of irrational people. But as the Tate exhibition effectively demonstrates in a section on the Suffragettes, public art institutions become targets for iconoclastic attacks because they are perceived to represent a cultural or political establishment from which some people feel disenfranchised or excluded. And though most museums and galleries strive to be more accessible and less elitist, this openness leaves their collections exposed to those with malicious intent, and increasingly so at a time when funding cuts are affecting staffing levels.
Tate’s show explores historical iconoclasm by examining the contested relationship between art and power. But it is worth remembering that these conflicts are very much alive today, wherever art is publicly displayed.
‘Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm’ is on at Tate Britain, London, until 5 January 2014From Apollo magazine
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Musée de Cluny, Paris
Plaque depicting the 12 tribes of Israel, mid 12th century
Northern France
Ivory, 19.2×13.1×0.5cm
Acquired with Fonds de patrimoine
Carved from a single piece of elephant ivory, this tiered relief depicts the 12 tribes of Israel – a subject usually treated in larger sculptures. It dates from the middle of the 12th century, and its small scale is beyond compare – there are no other known ivories like it, and scholars have yet to establish where it was made, and for what purpose. Classed a Trésor national, it is a superlative addition to Cluny’s impressive holdings of ivories. The museum has 300 pieces dating from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, forming one of the principal collections in Paris, rivalled only by the Louvre.From Apollo Magazine
A Sentimental Lot
ROBERT O’BYRNE
The Irish, as is well known, are a sentimental people. And nothing brings their sentimentality to the fore so much as the subject of emigration. Yet there is nothing new to this phenomenon: the Irish were ever a nomadic people. In 1816, for example, a parliamentary committee investigating the state of London’s police learnt the parish of St Giles alone contained six thousand Irish migrants. And from that time onwards the departure of native sons and daughters was abundantly marked, through lachrymose pictures like Henry Doyle’s Emigrants Leave Ireland (1868) or ballads such as Percy French’s Mountains of Mourne of 1896.
One might therefore imagine that after centuries of exporting generous quantities of her surplus populace to other countries Ireland was now accustomed to waving the farewell hankie. This is far from being the case: of late The Irish Times, which with its unofficial title of ‘The Paper of Record’ and distinguished history really ought to know better, has been indulging readers with a series entitled Generation Emigration. And a recent contribution on the @ireland twitter account summed up the national mood. ‘I wonder is there many from abroad coming home for Christmas?’ enquired the tweeter. ‘Such a great time of year, but possibly v sad if you can’t get home!’
Ah yes, the sadness of it all, let us not presume to suggest there might be just a smidgeon of self-indulgence in the mix. Just as there was of course none whatsoever apparent in a painting sold last week during an auction held by Adam’s of Dublin.
The work in question is called The Emigrants’ Last Farewell and was painted by Alfred Grey (1845–1926), a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy. Ironically Grey was himself the son of an emigrant, even if his father Charles (likewise an artist) had only moved from the west coast of Scotland to Ireland.
Unable to shrug off his Scottish ancestry Grey junior specialised in paintings of cattle and Highland landscapes, some of which are believed to have attracted the attention of Queen Victoria. Back in Ireland at least one observer was puzzled by his devotion to Caledonian bovines. In Five Years in Ireland 1895–1900 that clever lawyer and anti-clericalist Michael J.F. McCarthy wrote, ‘Mr Grey’s bulls, cows and sheep look plaintively at us in March, April and May every year from the walls of the RHS in Abbey Street. They are capital cattle, on misty braeside or knee-deep in the placid Tolka. I personally know them all, as if they were old friends, quiet, healthy, contented-looking animals. Mr Grey is as keen a cattle artist as Sidney Cooper, I think; but why does he go in for Scotch cattle so much?’
It was perhaps by way of compensation for all that Highland livestock that Grey decided to paint The Emigrant’s Last Farewell. One rather wishes he had not done so. It is a spectacularly bad picture and not just because the artist was determined to squeeze every last drop of mawkishness out of the scene, with the young wife inevitably clutching a baby while attempting to staunch tears, her husband, who sits on a basket carrying the couple’s few possessions, pluckily waving a hat at the rapidly vanishing shoreline.
As if this were not bad enough, the painting also displays all of Grey’s weaknesses as an artist, his inability to achieve foreshortening, his failure to keep the figures’ heads in correct proportion with their bodies, his rudimentary grasp of perspective. Above all, his risible representation of the family dog which looks to have strayed into the picture from a children’s comic. Whatever about his facility in portraying cattle, Grey had trouble with other animals. Not that this hindered bidding at the Adam’s sale. Expected to make €1,000–€1,500, The Emigrant’s Last Farewell sold for €2,000. In Ireland sentimentality trumps aesthetic sensibility.From Apollo magazine
A Roman Renaissance
PETER CRACK
Rome was a rather desolate place in the early Renaissance. Petrarch lamented in 1367 that ‘almost nothing was left of that old Rome but an outline or an image’. Plagued by disease, civic unrest and the absence of the papacy, the city’s population had plummeted. By 1400 the heady days of the empire were well and truly over.
Antoniazzo Romano (c. 1435–1508) is perhaps the only Roman artist of the period to have had a lasting impact. ‘Antoniazzo Romano: Pictor Urbis’ at Palazzo Barberini in Rome (until 2 February 2014) attempts to shed new light on this enigmatic artist’s career.
Patronage was paramount to Rome’s rehabilitation. After the Pope’s sojourn in Avignon, Pisa and Florence, the papacy permanently reestablished itself in the ‘Eternal City’ with the election of Pope Martin V in 1417. Successive administrations then set about stopping the rot on the banks of the Tiber, reasserting Rome’s spiritual and cultural supremacy.
The son of an artist, Antoniazzo grew up during this great upheaval. With the Pope back in town, art and architecture flourished. His early career is rooted in medieval Roman traditions. Works such as the Madonna and Child with Saints Francis and Anthony (1467) are proficient, if a little awkward. To Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s 19th-century eyes, Antoniazzo’s efforts were utterly inferior to the perceived developments in Tuscany. However, they are, arguably, Roman. The little we know of Antoniazzo’s life adheres to certain rebellious stereotypes. He was fined for brawling in the streets as a young man and he lived with several other local artists in what would now be considered an artist’s commune.
A jobbing craftsman, Antoniazzo served at the pleasure of the Vatican. Aside from the occasional high profile commission, such as decorating the Vatican Library alongside Melozzo da Forli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, this entailed an abundance of more mundane tasks, such as painting processional banners and designing heraldic devices.
However, this exhibition is more concerned with the inexact science of ‘influence’. Antoniazzo’s maturation is framed here in the context of his interactions with the central Italians who flooded Rome once the money returned. His Saint Jerome (c. 1485) and Deposition (c. 1497) reveal the impact of Perugino and Pinturicchio on his practice. Painted with a typically Umbrian delicacy, the gold ground has been replaced by blue skies and green landscapes.
Predictably, the Florentines also entered the equation. Antoniazzo’s standout masterpiece, an altarpiece painted for the church of Santa Maria del Popolo (1488–89), was painted in the new Tuscan pala style. The saints are serene yet solid, and Antoniazzo’s sparse composition and harmonious proportions rival anything produced by the likes of Benozzo Gozzoli or the Pollaiuolo brothers in Florence.
In the first decades of the 16th century Raphael, Michelangelo and Sebastiano del Piombo were busy defining the High Renaissance in Rome, leaving Antoniazzo in their wake. One of his last major works, the Annunciation (pictured above; 1500), marked the beginning of the artist’s decline. This unusual painting, archaic by the day’s standards, was more typical of painting in Rome before the central Italian invasion.
Antoniazzo’s established workshop and invaluable local knowledge had filled a vacuum during Rome’s early rejuvenation. But like his presumed mentor, Perugino, his dotage was not to prove artistically fruitful. Instead Rome had moved on. However, Antoniazzo’s eclecticism is perhaps what best defines Roman painting in the quattrocento. Fuelled by unprecedented levels of ecclesiastical patronage, waves of travelling artists mingled with ancient and local traditions, creating a cosmopolitan atmosphere where ideas were exchanged, rejected and transformed. Rome was on a course to eclipse all rivals, and although Antoniazzo was left behind, his mark remains on some of Rome’s most prestigious sites.
‘Antoniazzo Romano: Pictor Urbis’ is at the the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica at the Palazzo Barberini until 2 February 2014.From Apollo Magazine
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Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Extreme Unction, c. 1637–40
Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
Oil on canvas, 95.5×121cm
Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Fitzwilliam Museum, and acquired with additional contributions after a public appeal led by the Art Fund from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Friends of the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Monument Trust, and numerous private donors and charitable organisations
Following a period on display at the National Gallery while funds were raised to secure its acquisition (achieved late last year), this measured masterpiece from Poussin’s first series of the Seven Sacraments is at the centre of an ambitious exhibition initiative at the Fitzwilliam. The painting, commissioned by scholar and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo, depicts a man being administered the last rites. In 1785 it was acquired in Rome with the rest of the series by the Duke of Rutland, and caused a sensation when it was subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy. Joshua Reynolds judged the works to be Poussin’s greatest, in preference to the later series of 1644–48, on long-term loan to the National Galleries of Scotland from the Duke of Sutherland.from Apollo Magazine
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Apollo Advent Calendar: Day 15
APOLLO STAFF
Apollo is counting down to Christmas by celebrating some of the greatest acquisitions, gifts and bequests of 2013. We’ll take a closer look each day at one of the outstanding objects, works of art or collections shortlisted for the Apollo Awards Acquisition of the Year.The Meadows Museum, Dallas
Saint Paul the Hermit, c. 1715
Juan Alonso Villabrille y Ron (c. 1663–1732)
Polychromed terracotta
61×76.2×47cm approx.
Purchased with funds provided by Jo Ann Geurin Thetford in honour of Dr Luis Martin
This is a virtuoso example of baroque Spanish devotional sculpture, which sought to inspire Christian humility by paying minute attention to the suffering of the saints. Polychrome details such as the hermit’s taut, sunburnt skin and the startlingly convincing skull are closely observed from life, and the artist has even introduced additional props. The woven palm tunic is a unique attribute of Saint Paul the Hermit, who fled religious persecution in Thebes in the 3rd century to live a life of isolation in the desert. Its inclusion prompted researchers to rethink the identity of the figure, which was originally presented to the museum as Saint Jerome, whose iconography is otherwise similar.
Villabrille y Ron was an influential sculptor in the Spanish court at Madrid, but is little known today: few of the fragile terracotta pieces from the time survive, and those that do are often located in situ and seen by a limited audience. This is the first work by the artist to enter a US collection, where it has received significant scholarly attention.from First Things (December 2013)
The Catholic Writer Today
Encouraging Catholic writers to renovate and reoccupy their own tradition.by Dana Gioia, Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California
“Nowhere is Catholicism’s artistic decline more painfully evident than in its newer churches—the graceless architecture, the formulaic painting, the banal sculpture, the ill-conceived and poorly performed music, and the cliché-ridden and shallow homilies. Saddest of all, even the liturgy is as often pedestrian as seraphic. Vatican II’s legitimate impulse to make the Church and its liturgy more modern and accessible was implemented mostly by clergy with no training in the arts. These eager, well-intentioned reformers not only lacked artistic judgment; they also lacked a respectful understanding of art itself, sacred or secular. They saw words, music, images, and architecture as functional entities whose role was mostly intellectual and rational. The problem is that art is not primarily conceptual or rational. Art is holistic and incarnate—simultaneously addressing the intellect, emotions, imagination, physical senses, and memory without dividing them. Two songs may make identical statements in conceptual terms, but one of them pierces your soul with its beauty while the other bores you into catalepsy. In art, good intentions matter not at all. Both the impact and the meaning of art are embodied in the execution. Beauty is either incarnate, or it remains an intangible abstraction.
Whenever the Church has abandoned the notion of beauty, it has lost precisely the power that it hoped to cultivate—its ability to reach souls in the modern world. Is it any wonder that so many artists and intellectuals have fled the Church? Current Catholic worship often ignores the essential connection between truth and beauty, body and soul, at the center of the Catholic worldview. The Church requires that we be faithful, but must we also be deaf, dumb, and blind? I deserve to suffer for my sins, but must so much of that punishment take place in church?”
Full article available here:
http://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/the-catholic-writer-todayFrom The Spectator:
When soldiers have golden helmets and the wounded have wings
Stanley Spencer infused his war paintings with images of resurrection, as the exhibition Heaven in a Hell of War showsLaura Gascoigne 14 December 2013
‘Map Reading’, by Stanley Spencer, at Sandham Memorial Chapel
Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War
Somerset House, until 26 January 2014‘If I go to war, I go on condition I can have Giotto, the Basilica of Assisi book, Fra Angelico in one pocket, and Masaccio, Masolino and Giorgione in the other,’ Stanley Spencer wrote to the artist Henry Lamb in 1914. The sixpenny Gowans & Gray edition of the Masterpieces of Giotto now in a glass case in Somerset House’s exhibition Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War is the one that travelled with him two years later to the Macedonian front, where its imagery fused with his memories of war.
Although the idea of a fresco cycle of war paintings began incubating in Spencer’s mind in Salonika — ‘If I don’t do this on earth,’ he wrote to his sister Florence during a bout of malaria, ‘I’ll do it in Heaven’ — it wasn’t until 1927 that he was able to begin his visionary series of paintings for Sandham Memorial Chapel, 16 of which are temporarily billeted on Somerset House while the National Trust restores the building.
Washing Lockers by Stanley Spencer on the south wall at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire
The dream of a chapel of one’s own to decorate was easier to realise in Giotto’s day than Spencer’s, but Spencer got lucky. A pair of extraordinarily generous patrons, John Louis and Mary Behrend, commissioned a cycle of paintings and a purpose-built chapel in their home village of Burghclere, Hampshire. ‘What ho, Giotto!’ was Spencer’s response to the news. His patrons had wanted a secular memorial, but Spencer held out for the full Scrovegni works: a chantry chapel consecrated to All Souls and eventually dedicated to the memory of Mary’s brother Harry Sandham, a casualty of Macedonia. In the five years it took to complete the project, its spiralling costs almost cleaned the Behrends out. When a woman visitor to the chapel made the snide comment: ‘It smells of money here, doesn’t it?’ the artist replied: ‘No, only courage.’
Spencer’s art was never anything but personal, and his war paintings record his own experiences as a medical orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, first in Bristol and later in Salonika. Rather than commemorating war they celebrate peace, those rare interludes of it that could be snatched amidst the relentless bustle of army life — the forty winks grabbed on a grassy bank while an officer consults a map and other soldiers raid the bilberry bushes, or the halt at a water fountain around which soldiers flit like angels, rain capes flapping. Only Spencer could turn army regulation mackintoshes into wings and upended water bottles into heavenly trumpets.
At 5ft 2in tall, Spencer escaped transfer to an infantry unit until 1918, but as a medical orderly he picked up the pieces. ‘I had buried so many people and saw so many dead bodies,’ he told a reporter at the start of the project, ‘that I felt that death could not be the end of everything.’ Incapable of looking on the dark side like Nevinson or Nash, he infused his war paintings with images of resurrection, from the morning routine of Reveille to the ultimate miracle of ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’ in the chapel’s altarpiece, projected on to the exhibition’s end wall.
Detail from Bedmaking by Stanley Spencer on the south wall at Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire. This detail shows the bedmaker and the pin-ups above the bed, one of which is Hilda, the artist’s wife. Another is of the artist’s father at the door of Hedsor Church
It was a bitty sort of resurrection for the wounded soldiers patched up at Bristol’s Beaufort War Hospital, the heaven in a hell of antiseptic where Spencer started his RAMC service in 1916. His first impressions of the place were grim — ‘Had someone been around in the morning & dusted them with a duster?’ he wondered about the regimented laurels lining the drive — but in his vision of a ‘Convoy Arriving with the Wounded’ the laurels are banks of flowering rhododendrons and the wounded in their white slings and golden helmets have become a busload of angels with clipped wings. Inside the hospital walls we follow the artist on an endless round of floor-mopping, bed-stripping, laundry-sorting and tea-urn-filling that kept the orderlies busy 15 hours a day, with the odd ‘moment of peace’ where they could find it. Spencer found it, typically, ‘in the most unlikely places’, sneaking into a gap between the baths while his fellow orderlies scrubbed down lockers.
If there’s an opposite of machismo, Spencer embodies it. His war art looks for peace in army routine and homeliness in institutional domesticity. A sponge, a stack of buttered bread, a crumpled page torn from the Balkan News, are rendered in hallucinatory detail: ‘At the most important moments in my life,’ he noted, ‘I generally remember the least important facts.’ These are the details modern novelists record, not modern painters, but he wanted people to ‘read’ his pictures.
Spencer’s forms were significant in the wrong way for Roger Fry, but his paintings remain lucidly legible to us.
The exhibition tours to Pallant House, Chichester from 15 February to June 2014.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 14 December 2013
The Tree of Jesse at Soisson Cathedral showing the descent of Christ from Jesse through KIng David through Our Lady.
La Vierge de la Belle Verrière
Created in 1140 it was one of the few survivals from the fire of 1194 and one 175 representation of Our Lady in the the Cathedral.
The book held by the Christ child bears the inscription from St. Luke’s Gospel referring to the preaching of St John teh Baptist: omnis vallis implebitur and every valley shall be fill in.
This is the interpretative key to reading everything about the Cathedral at Chartres.
In the Liturgy proper to Chartres Cathedral, this antiphon was used psecifically for the Benedictus at the Matins of Saturday in the Embers of Advent (third Saturday in Advent). The full text runs: Omnis vallis implebitur et omnis mons humiliabitur et videbit omnis caro salutare Dei. (Every vally shall be filled in and every hill shall be brought low. And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
This particular liturgy was developed by Fulbert of Chartres (c.950-1028) and was designed to offer special homage to Mary as the Mother of God. The Marian emphesis in teh Advent liturgy began on the Wednesday of Ember week whose Gospel is the story of the Annuntiation. The readings of Matins are taken from bede and his commentary on the Annunciation. The accompanying responseries all contain Old Testament prophesies (especially from Isaiah) of the birth of the Messiah. On the Saturday of Ember week, the antiphon texts of Matins focus on the Davidic lineage of Mary. The readings of the Matins was taken from Gregory the Greath’s 20th homily on the Redemptoris Praecursor (i.e. John the Baptist). The Gospel of the same day is from St Luke 3.1-6 (John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness). “The combination of the readings from scripture, the commentary of Gregory teh Great, and the chant texts advances the idea of the root of Jesse, that the Christian Messiah, is teh new king and priest, a person who will supplant the old order of both kings and priests. The new king will sit on the thorne of David, and action that demonstartes his lineage and fullfills prophecy…Ths iturgy, first shaped in the Carolingian era, prsented materials adapted later in the eleventh and twelfth centuries through the interpretations of liturgical scholars [real ones] like Fulbert of Chartres and reshaped by men who designed the west facade of Chartres in the twelfth century….. Of special importance to the visual arts in twelfth century Chartres was the antiphon sung at the Benedictus of Lauds on Ember Saturday, “Omnis vallis implebitur”. …Ember Saturday was a solemn festival in the eleventh century, and the antiphon would not have been truncated in any way. This presentation would joing with teh apocryphal gospel related to the Virgin to make Mary the house of David, a tyheme central to the development of her cult at the cathedral of Chartres. – Margot Fassler op. cit.
“In this antiphon text, the act of seeing is emphasized (‘and all flesh shall see’), and the Virgin becomes the vehicle of revelation through lending her Davidic flesh back to its creator. This theme became of major importance to liturgy, exegesis, history marking, and the arts at Chartres in the central Middle Ages” – Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy, and the Arts.
