Praxiteles

Here is a picture of that interior. As you can see, the sanctuary prototype appears to have been Florence Cathedral but the dimensions of this church and the adaptation of the prototype ensure that the solution does not coherently work.

Assuming that the collection of bungalows on the hill side is Rostrevor? then I do understand your point and yes apart from Ronchamp and Tourette, the architectural cupboard is a bit bare, if you exclude glimpses like Autostrada.

That collection of bungalows is supposed to be a Benedictine monastery and the interior of the church that was posted is alleged to be the interior of a monsatic church.

This is hardly an alternative:

And as a monastic church, this is a complete absurdity:

Plans for a new Carmelite convent in Wyoming, USA

The design is by McCreary architects: http://www.mccreryarchitects.com/index.cfm/id/120/pid/0/page/philosophy

A new book on Harry Clarke.

A fresh window on Harry Clarke

William Butler Yeats assisted Harry Clarke in choosing Irish writers from which to inspire one of his finest works, the Geneva Window, only for it to be ‘disgracefully’ rejected.

HARRY CLARKE’S position in Irish art history has never been less than secure. Though he died, in 1931, at the early age of 41, and suffered from ill-health for much of his working life, he was remarkably industrious and productive.
Clarke is generally acknowledged as the country’s leading Symbolist artist, and as probably the finest Irish stained-glass artist ever. And there-in lies a problem, as many commentators have pointed out. For the most part stained glass is a site-specific, light-dependent medium.

Rather than being held in museums, his works are widely dispersed, installed where they were designed for, or even further afield, seen at their best only at certain times and atmospheric conditions.

George Russell, AE, an enthusiastic critic of his work, said: “Harry Clarke has a genius which manifests itself at its highest in stained glass.”

His biographer, Nicola Gordon Bowe, put it: “Because Clarke’s masterpieces are in the relatively inaccessible medium of glass and have to be tracked down in often remote churches or private collections, or have been lost after colour reproduction had done them little justice, the legacy of his short life has been insufficiently recognised.”

Her opinion was echoed by American curator Penelope Hunter-Stiebel, “The very nature of stained glass and the difficulty of photographic reproduction has limited the admirers of Clarke’s best work to those who visited the architectural sites for which it was commissioned.”

To make matters worse, Clarke’s last masterpiece and one of the outstanding achievements of 20th-century Irish art, the Geneva Window, was from the first ill-treated by the State, who originally commissioned it, and is installed in Miami.

Now a new book Strange Genius: The Stained Glass of Harry Clarke by Lucy Costigan and Michael Cullen, and a related website, makes the full extent of Clarke’s achievement accessible as never before. It does nothing less than document Clarke’s entire, extant stained glass works, be they in private or public hands.

Costigan achieved this remarkable feat with the aid of the 1988 Gazetteer of Irish Stained Glass, archival research, and a great deal of leg-work, visiting “churches, art galleries, the homes of private collectors and business establishments”.

Cullen worked to refine the means of capturing stained glass in photographs. The volume is a worthy, indeed indispensable companion to Gordon Bowe’s landmark 1989 biography.

You could say that Harry Clarke was born into the church-decorating business established by his father, Joshua, who had moved to Dublin from Leeds in 1877.

Joshua married a Sligo woman, Brigid McGonigal. She was a Catholic and he, a Protestant, converted.

Harry, born in 1889, was one of four children. He went to Belvedere College but left when he was 14, in 1904, the year after his mother died. He worked briefly in an architectural firm but was soon in the family firm.

Joshua, a cautious but intelligent businessman, had the wit to employ first-class stained glass makers and draftsmen, and Harry was apprenticed to one of them, William Nagle, a contemporary of the painter William Osborne, who worked with the firm until his death in 1923.

Clarke also attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin, where he was taught by AE Child of An Túr Gloine, the stained glass studio established by Sarah Purser in 1903. Among his co-students were Sean Keating and Margaret Crilly, a highly talented artist from Newry.

HE AND MARGARET married in 1914, and moved into a flat in North Frederick St. Harry worked from his father’s studios – he paid rent – but usually on his own commissions, which he became adept at winning. He found an influential patron in politician and stockbroker Laurence “Larky” Waldron.

He also spent time in London and was engaged by Harrap publishers to illustrate a 1916 edition of Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales . Those illustrations and a major stained glass commission, 11 windows for the Honan Chapel at University College Cork, completed in 1918, established Clarke’s reputation, and commissions flowed in.

The apparent contrast between the sacred and the profane in his work has frequently been noted, from the devout religious subjects that feature in some windows to the swooning sexual imagery of, for example, his illustrations for the Selected Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne.

It’s not clear that there is a real contrast, though. The mood that he most commonly creates, a dreamy, decadent melancholy, leaning towards the fantastic and the macabre, runs through most of his work in both glass and ink. Look closely and his saints and angels could well be languid fin de siècle sybarites, lost in an hallucinogenic trance.

What Gordon Bowe terms “the dual nature of his work” is already evident, she says, in the Honan Chapel windows.

Certainly Clarke was no conventional church decorator. His highly wrought, elaborately stylised compositions reflect a wealth of influences, literary and visual. The Celtic Twilight, French Symbolist writers and painters, Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt and more, all contribute to a heady stylistic mix that becomes, somehow and emphatically, Clarke’s own.

His inclination towards the proliferation of detail ran the risk of simply clogging up the compositional space, but in fact allowed him to create rippling, coruscating surfaces that come to life especially, even magically, in his glass work.

The Honan Chapel, the Eve of St Agnes window (with preparatory work in the Crawford Gallery in Cork and the piece itself in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin) and the Geneva Window are Clarke’s best-known stained glass projects.

But there’s a lot more, including substantial works in Cloughjordan Catholic Church, Tullamore Catholic Church (windows formerly in Rathfarnham Castle), the Presentation Convent Chapel in Dingle, St Joseph’s in Terenure, Dublin, the decorative windows in Bewley’s in Grafton St, St Eunan’s Cathedral in Letterkenny and the Basilica of St Patrick’s Purgatory at Pettigo, Lough Derg.

Abroad, there are significant works in Brisbane, Glasgow, Durham and of course Florida.

Costigan and Cullen come up with a tally of 160 stained-glass works by him, which is amazing given the brief span of his working life, the fact that he was afflicted by ill-health for much of the time (he was finally diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1929), and that, after his father’s death in 1921, he took on responsibility for the studios.

His brother Walter took on the ecclesiastical decoration side of the business, but he too was prone to health problems, and died suddenly, of pneumonia, in July 1930.

The story of the Geneva Window is particularly poignant and tragic. It was initially commissioned, in the mid-1920s, by the Government for the International Labour Court in Geneva, and then rejected in shabby circumstances. Clarke proposed celebrating Ireland’s writers in the window’s eight panels.

He enlisted William Butler Yeats to help him come up with 15 suitable candidates, with appropriate passages from their work to inspire the imagery.

Clarke seemed to realise something was amiss with the muted official response to the window’s unveiling at his studio in September 1930. A letter from President Cosgrave confirmed his suspicions. The president first expressed concerns about the nudity in one panel, but he later widened his criticisms to include the choice of writers included.

He wrote to Clarke, “. . . the inclusion of scenes from certain authors as representative of Irish literature and culture would give grave offence to many of our people”. The upshot was that the window was never sent to Geneva, but was instead ignominiously dispatched to Government Buildings in Merrion Square.

By the time of Clarke’s death he still hadn’t been paid for what was a huge and expensive project. Several weeks after he died, Margaret received a cheque.

“After many, many months of evasions and half-truths,” Clark’s friend Lennox Robinson wrote a few years later, “Harry’s widow was allowed to buy it back for the price the Government had paid for it.”

The window was for some years in the Hugh Lane Gallery, then at the Fine Art Society in London. In 1988, Clarke’s sons sold it to art collector Mitchell Wolfson, and it is now in the Wolfsonian Art Museum in Miami, Florida.

That, Brian Fallon wrote at the time was “poetic justice”.

In managing to ignore and lose such a masterpiece, he went on, “We have, quite simply, disgraced ourselves again.”

Strangest Genius goes some way towards making the Geneva Window immediately accessible.

Given the scope and detail of the work it documents, the book can only enhance Clarke’s reputation.

It looks as if the fundraising campaign for the restoration of Longford Cathedral has gotten off to a start in the United States. The following appeared recently in the Irish Emmigrant:

The Irish Emigrant – Articles

St Mel’s Cathedral restoration drive

Midnight Mass at St. Mel’s Cathedral was joyful, the decorations were beautiful, the choir was outstanding and the cathedral was standing room only. The homily was delivered by Bishop Colm O’Reilly and at the conclusion the priests and mass goers took the time to wish each other a Merry Christmas.

Little did they know that on Christmas Day 2009 their beautiful cathedral would be destroyed by fire and now lies in total ruin. Built 154 years ago by our ancestors, who had little in the way of material goods, it stood as the pre-eminent cathedral in the diocese, covering all of Longford and large parts of Leitrim, Westmeath and Offaly.

The daunting task of restoring St. Mel’s to its former beauty will be expensive and a long term project. The destruction can be seen by logging on to The Longford Leader, or the “RIP St. Mel’s” Facebook page.

Many fundraisers are planned in Ireland and abroad. Our fundraiser will be held on May 2, from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. at the Irish American Community Center, 9 Venice Place, East Haven, CT, 06511. Entertainment by Mark James, refreshments will be served. Those wishing to write a check should make it payable to I.A.C.C. St. Mel’s Restoration. Our committee welcomes anyone who wishes to help. Further information is available from Pat Hosey 203-248-1538 or p.hosey@sbcglobal.net.

And another piece:

Contemporary Church Architecture
by Thomas D. Stroka

Contemporary Church Architecture
by Edwin Heathcote and Laura Moffatt
2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 240 pages, $68
Purchase this book
Unlike any other building, a church is “an accessible public space amid an increasingly, and occasionally frighteningly commercial and privatized world.” Edwin Heathcote and Laura Moffatt highlight the role of church architecture in the modern world in Contemporary Church Architecture, which follows ten years after Heathcote and Iona Spens published Church Builders. In the new book, the authors document recent advances in church architecture, first with a historical narrative of progressive churches of the twentieth century and then a compilation of twenty-eight contemporary projects.

Church of Christ, Hope of the World, Donau City, Vienna, by Heinz Tesar, 2000.

Heathcote and Moffatt’s chronological history of church architecture assumes an evolution from the “historicism” of the nineteenth century to the seamless, industrial architecture of the modern age. The authors adequately cover projects throughout Europe, aided by drawings and small black and white photos of the more momentous projects. Each innovation is praised as a positive advancement of the building tradition, and the authors perpetuate the call for every church commission to be “of its time.” Instead of addressing the purpose of the church in the community, the authors fuse each architect’s work with broader political and cultural movements. For example, Josef Plecnik’s work in Vienna and Slovenia is considered a felicitous response to the nationalist period in which he was engulfed, while modernist projects in Britain are derided because they lack innovation and too closely imitate the works of Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier. In the text, the authors exalt the role of the architect rather than the patron and praise the church buildings most expressive of their time rather than those that are the most noble houses of God.

Contemporary Church Architecture follows the work of the Expressionists in Germany during the 1920s, including architects Otto Bartning and Dominikus Böhm. Böhm conceived of a perfectly circular church, the first modern Catholic church “unrestrained by the rectangular plan.” The authors give the project specific praise for its innovation for innovation’s sake. The Liturgical Movement in Belgium and Germany and its implication in sacred architecture is mentioned, but the text does not include an in-depth exploration of the meaning of architecture for Christian worship. For example, architect Rudolf Schwarz’s desolate church designs were generated by the liturgy in a so-called “Sacred Objectivity” that responds to the demands of the rites.

Harajyuku Church, Tokyo, by Ciel Rouge Création, 2005.

The contemporary church projects exhibited in the book are mostly small chapels, but they vary in their materiality and use of glazing. Some of the chapels simply consist of poured concrete walls and ceilings. Many of the projects, including a chapel for the Chancery of the Archdiocese of Berlin, bear no Christian symbols on the exterior or interior. In every project exhibited in the book, there are no hierarchical distinctions between the church buildings and their neighbors in the city. Regarding the interiors, many of the chapels fail to properly distinguish the sanctuary from the body of the church, often forming one space without a clear focal point for distracted worshipers. Other projects featured are disorienting in their structural logic and seem to disregard the community they are meant to serve. The authors suggest that the minimalist aesthetic commonly found in contemporary churches is rooted in the Cistercian tradition, but also admit that a global cultural exchange has introduced the sparsity of the Zen tradition into Christian architecture.

Heathcote and Moffatt allude to the uncertain future of church building in a radically secularized world and are realistic in their assessment of the drop in church attendance and its implication for the number of contemporary projects. The text can be humorous at times, especially in its criticism of architectural clichés: “architects approaching church design become obsessed with light. Light is uncontroversial, unlike say art or even form…it appeals to atheists as much, if not more than to Christians.” Despite the authors’ argument that churches are an important bastion of the public realm, Heathcote and Moffatt fail to include contemporary church buildings that incorporate the rich Christian tradition of art and architecture. They fail to convey that a noble and transcendent place for worship should be ordered and enriched by the timeless forms and symbols of sacred architecture. As a whole, the photographic documentation in the book is generous. Small black-and-white images and drawings accompany the historical essays in the first seventy pages, while full-page color photographs and line drawings illustrate the contemporary projects in the latter half of the book.

Thomas D. Stroka is an architectural designer in Indiana.

Back to the Future
Ecclesiastical Art after Postmodernism
by Dr. Janet Rutherford,

“The old Christian art should rise up again to renewed life: in its spirit, not in its form”
—Peter Lenz, The Aesthetics of Beuron

Is there a future for ecclesiastical art that continues in the traditions of the past, without being merely imitative: recycling past styles and models? I would like to suggest that there is, but that only by rediscovering the principles upon which the art of the past was based will artists have the necessary understanding to create art for the future. Western architecture is of course founded on geometric and physical principles that have been known since antiquity. For this reason architects who wish to continue in the Gothic or classical tradition are able to do so creatively, without being reduced to simply copying existing buildings. By contrast, decorative art is in a state of crisis. The arbiters of artistic fashion have deliberately withheld from art students the principles of Western aesthetics, in much the same way that many children of the 1960s were never taught to spell or punctuate. Unless artists in the West re-learn classical aesthetic principles, we will be left staring at the great white void of minimalism, as exemplified by the “renovated” monastery of Novy Dvur in the Czech Republic, bequeathed to posterity by John Pawson.

Aesthetics and Sacramental Symbolism in the Fathers of the Church

But to create ecclesiastical art, knowledge of aesthetic and compositional principles is not enough. For in the context of theology, and thus liturgy, aesthetics is not as an isolated subject. Like the Pythagoreans and Platonists of antiquity, the fathers of the Church regarded aesthetics as a keystone of the entire doctrinal and symbolic structure of theology—not to be separated, for example, from moral and sacramental theology, or the symbolism of the liturgy. For this reason forming an ecclesiastical art for the future is only in part a matter of teaching artists classical compositional principles. More fundamentally it involves an understanding, on the part of everyone involved in decisions about church decoration, of the sacramental and liturgical theology of which Christian aesthetics is but a part. A vitally important part of what the fathers have to teach us grew out of the first great iconoclastic controversy in the eighth and ninth centuries. Though the crisis itself mainly affected the churches of the East, it led to the development of the aesthetic theology surrounding the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and it is therefore a good starting point.

The newly dedicated chapel at the Monastery of Nový Dvůr in the Czech Republic. Photo: http://www.novydvur.cz

The Doctrinal Importance of Imagery

The fundamental iconographic principle deriving from the events surrounding the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) is that imagery in Christian churches is not only permissible, it is necessary. By creating images of Christ and his saints, we affirm the unity of the Person of Christ and the full reality of his Incarnate human nature. This important principle surely needs restating urgently today. Indeed, the chapel of the monastery at Novy Dvur would have met with the complete approval of the iconoclast emperors of the eighth century, who held that the only material things that have any sacramental character are the Eucharistic elements, and that the only permissible Christian symbol is the cross. The only sacred things in this chapel are indeed the reserved Host in the tabernacle and the cross on the altar. The doctrinal necessity of depictions of Christ and the saints in churches is part of Christian orthodoxy, and it is on this basis that we must build.

The Essential Unity of Architecture, Art, and Liturgy

Another important principle to arise from the Eastern iconoclast crisis was that there should be an essential unity between the church building, its interior art, and the sacramental symbolism of the rite they enshrine. In Orthodox churches this unity is represented in part by each image occupying a determined place in the entire schema of a church’s interior, just as each saint and heavenly being occupies a particular place in the heavenly kingdom. But I am not suggesting that the schema of Orthodox churches ought to be imposed on Western churches. An organizational schema provides a narrative that unfolds as the eye moves through a church. The centralized plan of Orthodox churches (deriving from ancient martyria), with its square nave, combined with a central dome, draws the eye along a different path than does the cruciform plan of many Western churches. Of course there are centralized neoclassical churches in which the hierarchical pattern of Byzantine iconography has always been appropriate, drawing the eye around and up into the dome. But even here, the existence of the iconostasis and consequent invisibility of the sanctuary in Orthodox churches make an exact adoption of their schema inappropriate. In a cruciform church of course the eye is drawn down the nave, into the sanctuary, and ultimately to whatever is on the east wall; and the organization of imagery should follow this path. The principle of iconographic integrity is therefore not a matter of imposing a particular schema on all churches, but involves understanding the underlying symbolism of both the liturgy and the church building.

The important principle here is again that a church’s architecture and art should affirm the complete unity of the divine and human nature of Christ, just as this is enshrined in the Eucharistic liturgy. Orthodox iconography does this by making two-dimensional images (suggestive of the heavenly nature of the resurrection body), but using the symbolic language of “icon writing” to teach Christ’s human nature and true incarnate vulnerability. Affirming both natures of Christ is also inherent in the two complementary symbolic understandings of the liturgy that Orthodoxy has. On the one hand, we are called to anamnesis of Christ’s earthly life, ministry, sacrifice, and Resurrection. But we are also called to see the place that the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ have in the entire history of salvation, from the Creation to the eschatological banquet. These two complementary Eucharistic symbolisms ought, on the principle of integrity, inform both the symbolic organization and form of a church’s interior imagery.

On this principle, then, we can decide on the organization of imagery on the basis of a given church’s architectural type. The content of that imagery is open to a wide field of choice and will inevitably be informed by a church’s dedication. The point is that all the images should cohere in a unified symbolism suggestive of one or other (if not both) of these two symbolic narratives: that of the life of Christ (and his saints) and that of salvation history as a whole. If these principles are adopted, the only thing that is prescriptive is that, in either narrative, the altar symbolizes the Passion. Wherever the eye has started its journey, when it arrives at the altar it has arrived at the Passion, whether in the story of Christ’s life or in the entire history of salvation. Images of the Resurrection, Ascension, Christ enthroned in glory, the eschatological banquet, etc., would therefore be most appropriate wherever the eye naturally goes next: the east wall or the ceiling (if not both).

Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom in the sanctuary of the Church of Annunciation in Prague-Smíchov, in the Beuron School.

The Form and Style of Artistic Depiction

Deriving from the need both to have art integrated with architecture and to do equal justice to the divine and human natures of Christ, we can then ask: What form or style of architectural and artistic representation is appropriate for a given church? Moving on from the principle of symbolic integrity, I would like to derive a principle of stylistic complementarity. Having affirmed the unity of the divine and human natures of Christ in the symbolism of the organizational schema of the imagery, we need to create liturgical spaces in which we can worship God as entirely integrated people, that is, with both our faculties of reason and intuition, or thoughts and feelings. Just as we affirm the integrity of Christ as one Person, human and divine, so, in order to be conformed to his image, we need to approach God as integrated human beings, whose thoughts are informed by our feelings and whose feelings are reasonable. Here we can draw on the teaching of the fifth-century Church father, Diadochos of Photike. He believed that as a result of the Fall of Adam and Eve, our feelings became disconnected from our reasoning; and that only the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ make it possible for human beings to regain their integrity. This seems to me to be very close to the thinking of Benedict XVI on the necessary integrity of thinking and feeling. To worship God with our minds alone would be to reduce ourselves to the state of the iconoclasts, to split ourselves in two, and at the same time to deny the unity of Christ’s divine and human natures. On the other hand, to rely only on our emotions could lead us anywhere, since we would not be able to make critical judgements about the innate goodness or evil of what our feelings were drawing us towards. The architectural form of the building, therefore, together with the schema and type of its imagery, should, as a symbolic unity, draw us as whole, integrated people to complete attention to what is happening in the liturgy.

I think that when viewed in this way, the architectural and artistic style of a church should strive to be complementary rather than identical, helping to unite our rational and intuitive natures in an integrated attentiveness to God as whole people. One way of doing this might be to combine realistic, emotive art with architecture that is ordered and symmetrical, and in that sense “rational”. Neoclassical architecture combined with highly representational art, as found in many churches of the High Renaissance, is an example of this.

Gothic architecture on the other hand has always been intended to elevate the imagination and spirit into realms of contemplation inaccessible to verbal reasoning. On the principle of complementarity I would therefore argue that in Neogothic churches the most approriate art is that which is figural but not representational, such as the idealized, abstract art of the middle ages.

But are we simply to be left with the option of replicating mediaeval and Renaissance styles? It is precisely by having an understanding of the principles of integrity and complementarity that the designer can be liberated to explore a wide variety of artistic idioms to create appropriate liturgical space: one that incorporates symbolism of the life of Christ and salvation history, and integrates representational art that can be applied to austere, symmetrical architecture to achieve this. The more pressing problem is knowing how to create modern idealized art to complement emotively uplifting architecture. What we need is western art that enshrines the same principles as those found in eastern iconography, while remaining in the western tradition of art. I am therefore not suggesting the slavish adoption of the compositional principles of Orthodox iconography. This iconography—literally “icon writing”—needs to be read by those nurtured in the Orthodox tradition. It cannot simply be lifted out of its context and put into another ecclesiological culture (particularly since it has a sacramental significance in Orthodoxy that art does not have in the West).

The use of single perspective composition, for example, is characteristically Western, and I think should continue to be normative. But there are compositional principles common to the idealized art of both east and west, and it is on this basis that new art can be created. For the sake of convenience I am going to call this new geometric art appropriate for Gothic churches not “Byzantine” or even “medieval,” but “Platonic,” since it will be composed on Euclidean/Platonic principles combined with the use of a single perspective. But it will, like Byzantine and medieval art, not be highly modeled but look relatively “flat” (or in the case of sculpture, “stiff”). So where should we begin our journey towards modern Platonic church art?

The Mother of God Enthoned in Glory with Saints Benedict and Scholastica, Saint Maurus Chapel, Beuron, Germany. Architect Desiderius Lenz, artist Gabriel Wüger. Photo: Andreas Praefcke

Peter Lenz and the Aesthetics of Beuron

To those who wish to develop the interior iconography of neoclassical churches, I leave the foregoing observations, and the suggestion that fully modeled, naturalistic art composed in dynamically complex schemata would be the best starting point, because it would complement the order and symmetry of the architecture. But I would like to concentrate on the future of neo-Gothic art. The medieval ideals of neo-Gothic art and architecture were part of the wider cultural movement of European Romanticism. The Tractarian Movement of the Church of England was part of this movement, and Pugin’s conversion to Catholicism bequeathed to Britain the neo-Gothic as a dominant influence for both Anglican and Catholic churches. From Britain it spread throughout Europe and the British Empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century the sculptor and painter Peter (in religion, Desiderius) Lenz, whose early training had involved making neo-Gothic furniture, was dissatisfied with naturalistic Renaissance art. Through studying classical and early Christian art he discovered exactly what the artist Jay Hambidge was to find in the early twentieth century: the Euclidian geometric principles that underpin Egyptian, Greek, and some Byzantine art. Significantly, both Lenz and Hambidge, with their trained artists’ eyes, first discerned these geometrical compositional features in the study of Greek vases. What they found were applications of the golden ratio (Greek letter “phi” j) to area and volume that had not been known to Renaissance thinkers, because in translating Euclidean and Platonic geometric writings into Latin, the Greek word for “area” had been mistranslated to read “line.” The rediscovery of root rectangles revealed the compositional principles of both Egyptian and Greek schemata. But while Hambidge was to continue his researches to incorporate principles of phyllotaxis, and came to concentrate on the dynamic symmetry of both root rectangles and the logarithmic spiral,5 Lenz was overpowered by the proportions present in drawings he found of Egyptian art. His reaction was so strong that it constituted for him an artistic conversion. He rejected the naturalistic art of the Renaissance and was convinced that he had found the universal canon of proportion and arrangement that had been present in early Christian art but had been lost in subsequent generations. At the same time he remained committed to medieval aesthetics that incorporate both Gothic architecture and “flat” art. The artistic result of Lenz’s thinking can be seen in his own work and in the School of Beuron art generally. His geometric principles are to be found in his unfinished The Aesthetics of Beuron. Lenz was in many ways a visionary, akin to William Blake, and his canon is so esoteric that it is difficult to understand its principles. But the presence in his art of root rectangles (particularly √5, also important to Hambidge because of its special relationship to the golden ratio, together with symmetrical composition and simplified abstract representation, is obvious. On these, if not on the entirety of Lenz’s canon, our future Platonic art can be based.

It is significant that, just as Pythagoras discovered the 1:0.618 ratio first by noting the relationship between the relative length of strings on a musical instrument and their musical pitch, so Lenz became absorbed in the relationship between these ratios by experimenting musically with an instrument known as a monochord. He was indeed first drawn to the Benedictine monastery of Beuron through the book Choral Music and Liturgy by Benedikt Sauter, who had spent time at Solesmes, and was convinced that there were inherent principles of harmonic unity that represent universal numeric relationships. This is a given of Platonism, and through his extensive reading of Platonists both pagan and Christian (particularly Saint Augustine), Lenz became convinced that the universals expressed in the chant of Solesmes and Beuron were the very ones he was seeking to embody in his art. For Plato and those in the Platonic tradition, the purest art is that which conforms most fully to the great underlying fundamental geometric principles: not the precise observation and representation of natural objects that was sought in Renaissance art. What both Sauter and Lenz were doing was in fact rediscovering the Pythagorean Platonic belief that, given that there are geometric principles that are inherent in all things, the characteristics of form have in and of themselves an effect that is moral.8 Indeed the ancient Greek “modes” (scales) of music, upon which the “tones” (scales) of Orthodox chant are based, were thought to have a moral influence when played to people, a belief accepted by many Church fathers.

The link between Platonic (Beuron) art, Platonic (Solesmes) Gregorian chant, and the Benedictine order is thus not only close, but intrinsic. Through his study of Gregorian chant Lenz came to emphasize the simple numbers closest to unity, namely 1–6. From the “hexachord” of Gregorian chant he developed his “senarium,” in which each number was represented by a different shape, with 6 (thought by both Vitruvius and Augustine to be the perfect number) expressed as a six-pointed star, the key component of Lenz’s canon.

Albert Gleizes and Platonic Art in the Twentieth Century

Lenz’s theoretical legacy reached a wider audience as a result of the translation of The Aesthetics of Beuron into French by the artist Paul Sérusier, a pupil of Paul Gaugin. Sérusier also gave a more practical explanation of Lenz’s rather esoteric writings in his ABC de la Peinture (1921). Through the works of Sérusier, Lenz’s theories of both liturgical art and music came to the attention of the equally esoteric artist, Albert Gleizes. Gleizes was as convinced as Lenz had been of the fundamentally sacred character of Platonically proportioned art. He also agreed that the same Platonic ratios underpin Gregorian chant. At this point tensions between the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions arise. Crudely put, the distinction between Platonism and Aristotelianism is manifest in our distinction between the arts and sciences. The thought processes of Platonists tend towards the synthesizing of disparate observations into a unified whole. This involves identifying universal underlying principles, in the way that Byzantine/Orthodox iconography does, and which Lenz and Gleizes attempted. Aristotelians on the other hand prefer to identify, analyze, and categorize discrete objects and phenomena. Gleizes believed that the Platonic/Aristotelian dichotomy was represented in the “Platonic” Benedictine Gregorian chant and Beuron art, in contrast to the Aristotelian/Thomist Dominican approach to art represented by Father Pie-Raymond Régamey, who was responsible for giving commissions to artists such as Henri Matisse and Le Corbusier. Régamey’s dislike of Gleizes was indeed part of his more general disapproval of the tradition of Beuron art and a thoroughly Thomist hostility to Platonism.

But in keeping with the principle of complementarity that I have outlined, I suggest that the tension between the Platonic and Aristotelain traditions should itself be seen as a corporate human manifestation of the “schizophrenia” described by Diadochos of Photike: the disjunction between the rationally analytical capacity of human beings and their ability to synthesize perceptions into a unified whole. On the principle of complementarity as I have described it, I would like to argue that “scientific” Renaissance art, with its basis in observation of nature, should not be regarded as the antithesis to abstract Platonic art, but rather as its complement. They should in turn both be employed in churches whose architectural style is complementary to their own. Combining the principle of complementarity with an overall scheme that follows the narrative either of the life of Christ or of the history of salvation (themselves affirming the complementarity of Christ’s divine and human natures) would satisfy the principle of the necessary symbolic unity of building, art, and liturgy.

The dome of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Cardiff, Wales. Photo: Martin Crampin

The Future of Ecclesiastical Art in the West

So how do we go about creating Platonic art “for today”? The very question is mistaken and derives from postmodernism. We have been forced into such a high degree of historical self-consciousness that we have been made to “try too hard” to belong to our age. But all art is going to reflect the period of history that the artist belongs to, as long as it is based on understood principles and does not merely copy past styles. Once artists are taught the aesthetic principles and theology that underpin the art of the past, they cannot help but create art that is “of their time.” This phenomenon can indeed be seen in many new Orthodox churches. Their architectural and iconographic principles have not changed since the fourteenth century, but no one seeing, for example, St Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Church in Cardiff, Wales, for example, could doubt that it had been made at any time prior to the late twentieth century. To the past then we must return, to study the great art of both the Renaissance and the Platonic tradition, in order to create new art to incorporate into the churches of today. But only a knowledge of both the aesthetic principles and the liturgical symbolism of the art of the past will capture its spirit, so that it can be given a new form for the future.

The interior of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Cardiff, Wales.

Dr Janet Rutherford is an author in the fields of church history and patrology, specializing in the Eastern Fathers. She is Honorary Secretary of the Patristic Symposium in Maynooth, Ireland; Irish Correspondent to the International Association for Patristic Studies; and an editor of the Fota Liturgical Conference Series.

Reassembled 15th-century altarpiece to go home
St Korbinian panels by Friedrich Pacher will return to the Austrian pilgrimage church

By Martin Bailey

london. A 500-year altarpiece by Friedrich Pacher has recently been reassembled and will go back to the Alpine village for which it was commissioned. The wings were lost in the mid 19th century and have been purchased after a Nazi-era restitution case.

Dating from around 1480, the St Korbinian altarpiece has now been restored and is on temporary display in Vienna’s Belvedere gallery (until 18 July), before it returns to the pilgrimage church in Assling, in East Tyrol.

The panels were made by Tyrolean painter Friedrich Pacher. In the centre of the altarpiece is a sculpture of St Korbinian by Hans Klocker. The 3.5m-high ensemble remained on Assling’s high altar until 1660, when a baroque altarpiece was installed, and the earlier one was moved to a side wall.

Between 1850 and 1864 the double-sided wings were removed, and presumably sold off. In August 1927 its predella with scenes of the life of St Korbinian was stolen, but was recovered two months later.

It was not until 1999 that the wings were identified by German art historian Ulrich Söding. They were then on loan from the Dutch state art collection to the Stedelijk Museum in Zutphen. Further research revealed that by the early 1930s they were at St Ignatius College in Valkenburg, near Maastricht. The double-sided wings had already been separated, creating four panels, of which two had also been cut down at the top and bottom. In 1936 the wings were bought by Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose collection was subject to a forced sale by the Nazis in 1940. The panels then went to Hermann Göring’s hunting lodge at Carinhall (and were returned to the Netherlands after the war).

In 2006 the Dutch government restituted the Goudstikker paintings to his heirs, who consigned most of them to Christie’s in 2007. The two pairs of wing paintings were sold as different lots, which means that they might have become separated after more than five centuries. The outer pair fetched £24,000 and the inner pair £192,000. Both were bought by the Tyrol authorities.

Conservation of the wings has proved complex. The double-sided wings had been sawn in two, and the wooden panels had then been thinned and later mounted on a chipboard support. The previous restoration, in 1963, was very poorly done, and retouched colours had aged and whitened, leaving blotches.

At the Vienna conservation studio of the Bundes*denkmalamt (federal monument office) the ensemble was examined with x-rays and infrared reflectography, revealing Pacher’s underdrawing. The panels were cleaned and the damaged 1963 retouchings were removed and redone. The two which had been cut down were brought back to their original dimensions, with modern additions. The wings were then inserted into new frames, so that they can be displayed as originally intended.

Caravaggio’s decollation of St John the Baptist of 1608