I would like to thank George Corbett for inviting me to give this talk and the chance to
participate in this exciting venture of CEPHAS. I would like to acknowledge the
invaluable assistance I have received in the preparation of my lecture given to me by my
friend Franz Forrester, with whom I have created an educational project that in many
ways shares the same ambitions as does CEPHAS. And finally to mention that my
father Bryan Hornsby has been, in recent discussions as ever, my inspiration in my work
and my thoughts on art, music, philosophy and religion.
The title of my talk indicates a very wide ranging and ambitious scale and so it is clear
that while bearing in mind the theme in this wide sense, I am obliged by the constraints
of time if nothing else to limit the frame of reference. So I am going to concentrate on
some aspects of the development of the Western Canon. I would like to begin by
showing a short film that I put together for my students, postgraduate musicians at the
Royal Academy of Music in London, where I was asked to provide a series of lectures on
the cultural and artistic contexts for music. The film covers the historical period 1000 to
1800 and the point of the film is to show art objects (specifically buildings and paintings)
in tandem with music that is more or less exactly contemporaneous with the art. I have
included the names of the artists – where known – and composers. It is not meant to be
a guessing game of locations or works or periods but a journey through western art to
highlight the importance of the historical and patronage context in which these works
were made. As I was putting the film together I realised that I was making a personal
journey through works of the western artistic canon – and so it suits me to show it here,
to introduce the talk and to give an opportunity to hear some music that is otherwise
often problematic to incorporate into a normal presentation.
(link to art and music film
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkVSzhmpGh8)
I end that film with Beethoven and with a painting by Goya, the Third of May, that
depicts an event in contemporary history, the execution of citizens of Madrid by the
Napoleonic troops in reprisal for the uprising of the previous day, the infamous Dos de
Mayo in the year 1808. This painting has been described by Kenneth Clark as ‘the first
great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense of the word, in style, in
subject, and in intention’. It stands at the beginning of a new sensibility in the visual arts
that is matched by Beethoven in music, the movement that we now call Romanticism, in
which the expression of personality of the artist and the purpose of the work of art
moves outside the boundaries that conventions had sanctified. Of course you will note
that neither in this painting, nor in the Beethoven sonata that I have chosen to
accompany it, is what we can understand by the artistic canon infringed. The music is
tonal, formally conservative, rules of harmony are adhered to, while the painting is a
painting of men who look like men, made in oils on canvas. I could have found more
radical examples of the break with tradition had I looked. So it bears examining why I
chose those two pieces of art – and if I say that “I chose them because I like them,
because they are beautiful” is that simplistic and glib, or is that really the whole point… ?
My answer is that we have to decide what we mean by The Beautiful in order to
understand the Canon in its origins. I will look at aesthetics occasionally throughout this
paper, while being aware that the subject is too complex to examine fully here.
I want to look specifically at the notion of The Canon – what that term has continued to
mean in the arts, in literature, in thought, in liturgy - in the ancient and the Christian era.
The point that I hope to elucidate in the talk is that by using the Canon as a benchmark
for understanding culture, we can retain the continuity of meaning across the centuries
and civilisations that extend from Ancient Greece to our present day life in Europe and
lands which have a European cultural base such as the US and Australia. I want to talk
about a heritage that is common to all of us who make our homes in these parts of the
world and why this heritage is essential to the survival of our civilisation. The points that
I will be making are far from new, and certainly are not mine. They have been
articulated by writers and philosophers more eloquently than I am able to do. Jacques
Maritain, Christopher Dawson, John Dewey, Roger Scruton, Jacques Barzun, Umberto
Eco are some whose works I have read and discussed over the last couple of years contributions to the conversation about culture and why it “ counts”, as Scruton says that have helped me to form my ideas in to a clearer pattern.
METROLOGICAL RELIEF, 5TH C. BC
The Canon means rule – specifically and originally a piece of wood of a certain length, to
be used as a measurement It has other meanings which are pertinent to our enquiry –
the Canon of the Mass, the canonical books of the Bible, the canonization of saints that implies the inclusion of certain people into a group with a set of rules of entry; and
more recently, the listing of books of the western Canon by educators such as Mortimer
Adler with the so-called Great Books programme – (the Pléaide, Harvard Classics and
more recently Penguin Classics are others similar). A favourite Canon for me is that of
the 154 poems by the 20th c Alexandrian writer Cavafy, so named by him in awareness of
the tradition from which he drew his inspiration.
We have become familiar with the idea of “ The Classics” - “100 books to read before
you die” “100 best paintings in London” and so on. Making lists has become a modern
habit. It is what remains of a cultural consensus in this era of fake art and virtual reality
experiences. The establishment of a Western Canon of important books grew out of the
worthy Enlightenment urge to taxonomy and classification – the Encyclopédie,
Linnaeus’s System of Nature, Johnson’s Dictionary for example – that in themselves
create canonical sets. These ‘sets’ were made with a didactic aim and they rely heavily on
academic precedents established, as we shall see, over the previous millennia. The
problem with reliance on precedent, is that it has come to be associated with the stifling
of imaginative responses in art and thought; a notable negative reaction to this type of
codification produced the Impressionist movement in French art in the 19thc. Indeed
one could characterize that era as being one in which the academic and canonical cultural
systems became societal norms, associated with bourgeois respectability, and gradually
detached themselves from their roots in truth, becoming utilitarian and self serving. This
perversion of the essential role of the canon as guardian of the True, the Good and the
Beautiful has led to its abandonment in all but the most superficial aspects in
contemporary society.
To make an attempt to re-evaluate these traditional sets of ideas, I would like to take
some examples of the Canon in various of its referents, seeing how they inter-relate and
inform the discussion of what constitutes a system connecting the arts throughout the
development of Catholic thought. I show this slide of the Greek, Latin and English of St
Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 10 verse 13 as a preamble and hopefully
a humbling meditation as I develop my thesis in this talk.
FOUR EVANGELISTS - RAVENNA – 6th c.
We can look firstly at the development of the Canonical books of the Bible and see from
where this most central of “sets” derives. The earliest extant list of the books of the New
Testament, in exactly the number and order in which we presently have them, is written
by Athanasius in his Easter letter of 367. By 1442 at the Council of Florence, the entire
Church recognized the 27 books, though still did not declare them unalterable. It was not
until 1546, as a reaction to Luther’s translation and alteration of the order that, at the
Council of Trent, the Church reaffirmed the full list of books as traditionally accepted.
Here the often neglected but obvious fact should be affirmed – that codification of
theory often lags behind its practice by a very long time and the Church’s “ time” is
notoriously long. When stirred into action by the attack on the Canon by Luther, the
promulgation of this and other diktats relevant here, such as those about art and music
was finally made, as we shall see later on. I would like to quote from an explanation of
the Tetramorph written by St. Ireneaus in the second century, in his Against Heresies:
It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are
four quarters of the earth in which we live, and four universal winds, while the church is scattered
throughout all the world, and the 'pillar and ground' of the church is the gospel and the spirit of life, it is
fitting that she should have four pillars breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men
afresh… Therefore the gospels are in accord with these things… For the living creatures are quadriform
and the gospel is quadriform… These things being so, all who destroy the form of the gospel are vain,
unlearned, and also audacious; those [I mean] who represent the aspects of the gospel as being either more
in number than as aforesaid, or, on the other hand, fewer."
Here we see the identification of the Canon with the created world, specifically with
narratives of the form of the universe derived from the ancient philosophers. This is an
attempt to reconcile the innate perfection of forms within the Creator and his revelation,
with the partial or imperfect forms that are the artistic products of human history. The
problem of the continuity or discontinuity between Creator and creation in terms of art
and of the beautiful was present for Augustine and later for Aquinas. Here it is baldly
stated and not explained either in terms of natural philosophy nor of theology, but of
number symbolism. We will see later how important is the human scale and measure
when the various Canons in art are established.
MASTER OF THE MASS OF ST. GILLES 15TH C.
The formulation of the Canon of the Mass is worth examining more closely, since it lies
at the heart of Catholic worship and its nature as a “set” of words, and the adherence to
that formula, has had and continues to have implications that reach to the centre of the
meaning of the Eucharistic mystery. Much of the special character of the Canon of the
mass as it developed in the early centuries of the church is dependant on the language in
which it was written. Once Latin was adopted as the liturgical language in the 2nd and 3rd
centuries, there are references to prayers that have essentially the same wording as the
Canon we now use.
SACRAMENTARY OF GELLONE
There was doubtless a re-ordering of the prayers in early years, including the opening
phrase Te igitur, where the grammar is clearly wrong, since there is nothing foregoing to
which the “therefore” can refer - and in some places and at some times the extent of the
Canon was wider, including the Preface. When St. Gregory became pope the Canon was
already fixed in the order we now have it and despite the vagaries of fashion when, in the
medieval period liturgies were created that added Biblical stories and saints’ lives as part
of the mass, it has survived down to now; a case where apostolic precedent and the
authority of papal infallibility combined to ensure continuity. In another example of
legislation that was both retrospective and intended for future generations, Pope St. Pius
V published an authentic edition of the Roman Missal in 1570, and accompanied it with
a Bull forbidding anyone to either add, or in any way change any part of it. Here is not
the place to discuss the results of the twentieth century decisions that undermined that
edict (without specifically overturning it, which was essentially impossible) except to
make the general point that once a system sanctified by such high authority is set to one
side, the varied results of that displacement cannot be expected always to be harmonious,
as we can see all over in contemporary Western liturgical practice. Before leaving this
image, we can yet again see the concern of Christian art to combine the human form and
the biblical narrative in a manner that is both richly symbolic and highly functional as the
position of the angels singing the Sanctus lead directly to the tree/cross/ crucifixion
capital letter T of the next prayer, the beginning of the Canon.
PYTHAGORAS AT CHARTRES PORTAIL ROYAL, 1140
Turning now to the arts, we begin with the writers of antiquity, from whom the thought
of the western tradition and therefore that of Christian Europe is derived; I make no
apology for the length of time I will spend in the pagan era….
The Greek kanon, or measuring stick came also to be the monochord instrument on
which tuning for musical performance could be done. Pythagoras, in the legend, is
supposed to have formulated the mathematical intervals in music harmony – the octave,
the fifth and the fourth by hearing hammers striking an anvil. The “rule” established by
this system was recognized as fallible by Plato and by Aristoxenus as being incompatible
with the heard sound (that has been solved in modern times and on modern instruments
by equal temperament). Plato, typically, prefers the rational to the phenomenological
solution – making the distinction between the lowly, practical, musician and the higherbecause-intellectual, rational musician – one who “loved” music - that was continued
later by Boethius and others; but by no-one was the basis of Pythagorean harmony
questioned. In terms of musical performance, the word canon was originally derived
from this meaning of measurement, as it referred to the relationships between voices
singing in harmony. In many accounts, the first piece of secular music that we have is a
canon of the type known as a rota or wheel, the English song Sumer is Icumen in, from
about 1250.
YOUNG CICERO VINCENZO FOPPA 16TH C
In antiquity, the term came to be used as a standard of excellence also in literature, for
example Herodotus was the ‘canonic’ writer of the Ionian dialect, one member of
perhaps the first ever grouping of the “classics”, that was made in the library of
Alexandria. However, it is with the rhetorical concept of decorum, the genera cited by
Cicero - who in his phrase ‘As in Life, so in Rhetoric…’ sums up the indissoluble link
that must exist between nature and natural forms and the arts, an analysis based on that
of Aristotle - that we find the most pertinent connection to music through the system of
the Modes, to architecture. In De Oratore, Cicero states that there are three types of
oratory ‘plena, teres’ meaning full and round; ‘tenuis, non sin viribus’ – fine and strong at the
same time - and the intermediate ‘mediocritas’ which shares both types. These had links
with specific Greek racial groups and with sexual-moral types – manly/compressed,
womanly/attenuated etc. Straightaway we can see the shared vocabulary with the modes
of music – Dorian , Phrygian, Lydian etc. which can then be connected with the orders
of architecture - Doric, of course, Corinthian and the intermediate, Ionic.
ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS AS GODS, JOHN SHUTE 16TH C
Both in formal and conceptual ways the desire to create a unified system across the arts,
seeing them as different means of expressing the same ideas, is recognisable from these
early theoretical notions. That this unity should extend into the Christian era and emerge
codified as the quadrivium and the trivium, the canonical seven liberal arts taught in
universities across Europe for a thousand years, is therefore obvious.
Before looking at the Canon of architectural form, it is instructive to glance at the
philosophical context from which Cicero and others drew their theories. Plato’s
aesthetics, so influential later in their reformulation in early modern Italy had stressed the
weaknesses of visual art - as a mere mirror to reality and lacking in truth – and that the
pleasure in its contemplation was detrimental to the life of reason and the intellect. He
spoke of the war between the philosopher and the poet and ranked the former most
highly and the latter most lowly. The relationship of aesthetics to techne –making of art
objects, is not clearly established in Aristotle. In his Poetics he deals with the concepts of
catharsis in drama and with mimesis, to which he unlike Plato, ascribes a positive role.
Music is more fully dealt with in the Politics, since the analysis of the Modes provided a
means to discuss the affective aspect of the music – its ethical role in the society of men.
TONES OF PLAINCHANT – CAPITAL FROM THE ABBEY OF CLUNY 10TH C.
Like Plato, there is a separation between what is Beauty and what is Art, because of the
nature of art as having a purpose to its creation and to its existence, whereas Beauty itself
is pure, not having any purpose. Here is a longish quotation from the Politics that makes
clear his view:
Moreover, as music is one of those things which are pleasant, and as virtue itself consists in
rightly enjoying, loving, and hating, it is evident that we ought not to learn or accustom ourselves
to anything so much as to judge right and rejoice in honourable manners and noble actions. But
anger and mildness, courage and modesty, and their contraries, as well as all other dispositions
of the mind, are most naturally imitated by music and poetry; which is plain by experience, for
when we hear these our very soul is altered; and he who is affected either with joy or grief by the
imitation of any objects, is in very nearly the same situation as if he was affected by the objects
themselves; thus, if any person is pleased with seeing a statue of any one on no other account but
its beauty, it is evident that the sight of the original from whence it was taken would also be
pleasing … Besides, statues and paintings are not properly imitations of manners, but rather
signs and marks which show the body is affected by some passion.
Aristotle implies here a ranking of the arts and claims that the visual arts are less affective
than music, thereby fixing the status of the art object for the next thousand years.
Sculpture really had the hardest struggle to emerge as a ‘fine’ or ‘liberal’ art, dealing as it
did with large lumps of stone, with hammers and saw and drills, with toil and sweat.
Michelangelo knew the burden of this accepted view.
Aristotle’s points bring us to the first of the written Canons of art that I would like to
mention, that of the sculptor Polycleitus. His canon, written at the end of the 5th century
BC is known in quotations by later writers, but most vividly exemplified in his Doryphoros
with which he is considered to have created movement in the static representation of the
human form, an expression of the Pythagorean concern for binary opposites, as quoted
by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, three of which are:
right and left
rest and movement
straight and curved
The contrapposto seen in this statue is the expression of these contraries and informed by
the Pythagorean arithmetical measure of proportion (as expressed in music as we have
seen) and the principle behind it is symmetria, the mastery of which leads to the
conjunction of the Good and the Beautiful. In commenting upon the opinion of the
Stoic philosopher Chrysippus that health in the body was the result of the harmony of its
constituent elements, the physician Galen (second century A.D.) reveals his knowledge
of the text of the Canon and of the lost statue made as an exemplar.
Beauty, Chrysippus feels, resides not in the commensurability (symmetria) of the
constituents (of the body), but in the commensurability of parts, such as the finger to the
finger, and of all the fingers to the metacarpus and the wrist (carpus), and of these to
the forearm, and of the the forearm to the arm, in fact of everything to everything, as it
is written in the Canon of Polycleitus.
It would appear that bodily health is connected intrinsically with beauty – and thus the
Perfect or the Good. The part the Canon had to play was teaching the method of
producing this healthy beauty in art – hence the use of young athletic bodies to represent
the gods and from there the “ideal” form of human beauty. Though of course this was
not without its critics and other sculptors created statues according to variants in this
system of proportion such as Lysippus, court artist to Alexander the Great.
It is clearly a small step from the Canon of proportion of the body to that of the orders –
most specifically the Doric – male and the Ionic – female as expressed in Vitruvius’s De
Architectura, written in ten books dedicated to the Emperor Augustus. Vitruvius, a later
contemporary of Cicero writing in the first century BC, insisted on the development of
buildings from natural forms – proportion in all the parts – and from natural necessities.
LAUGIER’S VITRUVIAN HUT, 18TH C.
He wrote accounts of the beginnings of the three orders in Greek architecture,
associating them with gender, dress and the ritual worship of the gods, thus creating a
narrative basis to the arithmetical canon of proportion. That the laws of nature should be
reflected in the laws of art comes from Aristotle’s Physics: “as in human operations, so
in the process of nature, and as in natural process, so in human operation…human
operations are for an end, hence natural process is also thus”. He then goes on to
describe how a man-made house would be - the same as a “natural” house, with the
important proviso that “nothing interferes”. It is this principle that underlies Vitruvian
theory which remained as the only canon in architecture right up until 1452 with Leon
Battista Alberti’s De Re Aedificatoria, which restated the primacy of the classical
architectural forms.
That there should have been a revolution in the way the orders were used with the arrival
of the Church as a force in Western society is obvious. But we should not be satisfied
with creating an opposition between Gothic and Classical, medieval and Renaissance.
The continuity in the canon – in architecture and in all of the liberal arts – was of much
greater significance than the disconnect. Notions that we may take for granted such as
the four gospels for the columns to hold up the house – the House being Christ and
therefore the Church; the image of God in man meaning that the Body is Christ were
illustrated right through the early medieval period and codified in theory.
FULDA CHRIST COLUMN
A thread connecting the meaning of the architectural canon for the ancients to its
appropriation and enrichment by the Church as a mystical concept embracing the
demands of scripture (identified by the scholar John Onians) is from Pliny’s Natural
History through the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville to the first great Christian
Encyclopedia, the De Universo of Hrabanus Maurus of Fulda written in the 840s. The
architectonic vocabulary becomes anthropomorphic – the column becomes a body
(specifically The Body of Christ) the capital is the head, and so on. The image shown
here is the so-called Christussaule at Fulda (a particularly relevant appropriation of the
Germanic pagan worship of the Irminsul – destroyed by Charlemagne – which was a
wooden tree trunk, of enormous sacred status). It stands in the crypt of the monastery
church and holds up one entire section of the building. A similarly important Christ
column was erected at St Michael Hildesheim, the church shown right at the beginning
of the film we saw earlier.
The number symbolism becomes more and more significant as the richnesses of Catholic
thought enveloped and formed around the philosophy of antiquity and the late antique
period.
Columns at the east end of St Denis near Paris formed a U shaped double row of 12 and
12 to represent the prophets and the apostles and Abbot Suger in his account of the
rebuilding of the church around 1140 had insisted on structurally less strong columns,
not bulky piers, being representative of the human body. This choice necessitated a
lighter upper structure and more concentrated thrust from the walls down to the ground.
And so the pointed arch was used and the larger window openings created – an example
of a new style created out of a happy combination of technical necessity and the
influential light symbolism of mystical theology derived from the writings of the 6th c
neo-Platonic theologian Pseudo-Dionysus.
COLUMN FIGURES AT REIMS AND CHARTRES
The Catholic intellectual tradition as it had developed over the first millennium, was the
bridge for ideas to flow from the pagan to the Christian era. That the meditations of
Christian mystics, whose readings embraced both pagan, scriptural and patristic texts
would be a fertile source for art is clear. Making a comparison of this image representing
a vision of the 12th century composer and writer Hildegard von Bingen with the well
known version of Vitruvian man by Leonardo da Vinci is instructive:
The medieval vision was to create the harmony between God and his creation, as shown
by the Creator englobing the man (clearly the man/God ) in the Hildegard image; while
in Leonardo the perfect forms of square and circle ( ratio – or logos in Greek) are the
context for man’s relationship within the cosmos. Man as the measure of all things (the
phrase is from Protagoras) is not the humanist mantra. It is a concept explored
universally..
There is only a small step from Hildegard’s vision of man to this less than 100 years later,
the first depiction in art of Christ as a dead body on the cross, by Giunta Pisano at San
Domenico in Bologna.
In this era, visual art relied heavily on metaphor and symbol - God as creator seen in all
of nature meant that all aspects of the natural world - light, proportion, the universe, the
seasons, animals and plants, were united in meaning. The growth in the wealth, power
and influence of the Church as patron of the arts led to a huge expansion in demand for
art objects and as the city state and nation states developed, the secular market grew in
tandem.
LABOURS OF THE MONTHS FROM THE TRES RICHES HEURES
There was no perceived boundary between what was material thought suitable for secular
or for religious art – popular songs became themes for mass settings and narrative
paintings were rich in imagery from daily life and from nature as well as from Scripture.
For example the highly popular Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, probably complied
around 1260, was full of fanciful and bizarre elements and was a rich source of subject
matter for painting - and as such might be described as a Canon of iconography of the
saints.
In philosophical terms, Biblical Christianity implies human imperfection and the contrast
with the complete perfection of God that is bridged by Christ. The difficulties of
reconciling the fallible human with the perfect divine – for our purposes, human art and
the pleasure of sensory perception to the transcendent notions of beauty and goodness,
were examined by philosophers through the medieval period, Pseudo Dionysus, as we
have seen, Albert the Great and his pupil Aquinas. It would appear that the iconoclasm
in the Eastern church was in part justified by this neo-Platonic dichotomy. The resultant
codification of artistic forms of representation - a restrictive canon intended to solve the
problem of how to contain the power and resonance of the human image in the religious
context - had connections with the Eastern traditions, such as the asanas, the poses of
the Buddha.
GANDAHARA BUDDHA 16TH C./ PANTOCRATOR FROM HAGHIA SOPHIA
The results are that an icon made in the Orthodox tradition now is formally very like
one made in hundreds of years earlier.
RUSSIAN ICONS OF ST NICHOLAS – 18TH C. AND 21ST C.
That the visual arts in the Catholic west developed beyond such restrictions has many
causes, perhaps the philosophical reconciliation brought about with the art of the ancient
Greeks through the Roman tradition being the most significant. Alberti, whom we have
discussed in relationship to architecture, wrote a treatise Della Pittura – his own
translation of his Latin original, in 1436 a few years after his arrival in the family home
town of Florence from Venice, Padua and Bologna where he had undergone a liberal arts
schooling and university education in canon and civil law. From his analytical and
mathematical training he developed a system by which the art of painting could be raised
to the high status of a liberal rather than a mechanical art.
PALAZZO RUCCELAI IN FLORENCE, DESIGNED BY ALBERTI
Following St Thomas and Aristotle he saw that beauty was the harmony of all parts in
relation to one another and thus Nature, defined as all that is outside the individual and
of which he is also a part, is One. This being the case, the whole is knowable from its
observable parts. Since man, nature, and mathematics are all parts of the same whole,
man has only to use mathematics to understand and even to control nature. The
influence of his theories, particularly on perspective, were the engine for the revolution
in the practice of painting in the mid to late 15th centuries and immensely influential on
the canons of practice codified by the later academies of art (as was his De Architectura on
building practice). His position has been described as Christianized Ciceronian stoicism.
From Cicero he drew a method of analysis and synthesis, as we saw earlier applied to
architecture. The system of Ciceronian rhetoric is applied to nature and to art.
My final example of a written system or theory for the arts are the decrees of the Council
of Trent that were formulated as a response to the spread of the Protestant reforms
across Europe, mentioned at the beginning of this paper in relation to the biblical canon.
Musical reforms – insisting on intelligibility (not polyphony per se, despite the legend that
Palestrina single-handedly ‘saved’ polyphony by his Missa Papae Marcelli), and the banning
of inappropriate secular texts from liturgical music – were discussed in the 22nd session of
the Council in 1562 while the visual arts were dealt with in the 25th session in 1563. Most
notorious was the attack launched by reforming clerics on the fresco painted by
Michelangelo above the altar in the Sistine Chapel, the Last Judgement.
These short documents produced by the Council were the fruit of discussions and
consultations over many years and had far reaching influence in the development of a
declamatory, realistic style and the reduction in the use of symbolism and metaphor that
had characterised art over the previous 4-5 hundred years. The art patronage of the new
Orders - the Jesuits and the Oratorians were perhaps the most significant – ensured the
spread of these new styles of realism across Europe and into the New World.
CARAVAGGIO INCREDULITY OF ST THOMAS
The genius of the Church was to respond to the Lutheran and Calvinist urge to
iconoclasm, not by creating a new Canon for the arts – by definition, the Canon was
unchanged, but by stimulating an aesthetic in which the arts were imbued with a new
vigour emphasising the personal relationship of man with God.
There is no place here to trace the decline of the Canon in the arts – other than to note
that it goes hand in hand with the decline of religion. We can posit a divide at the
Enlightenment. Before philosophy began to set the place of God in the universe on one
side, in order to answer the perennial questions in a different way, the Canon of the arts
was an expression of the natural state of learning, the assumption of the central role of
God in human experience. There was a constant reference to past greatness and a
concomitant yearning for novelty. The tension between the two energies was contained
by the Canon - thereby producing the extraordinary richness that is our particular
heritage in the West. As Roger Scruton has written recently in his book The Face of God :
‘What does not change is the best way of representing what does not change’.
Post-Enlightenment art had to look elsewhere – to nature (hence the rise of landscape,
surely one of the ‘good fruits’) and recast the role of the artist as self appointed hero of
expression.
WEEPING WOMAN, PICASSO 1937/ PENITENT MAGDALEN DOMENICO
FETI 18TH C.
Picasso had much in common with Luther – trained to be masters in the Canons of
their respective fields, but by their actions presiding over the displacement and eventual
destruction of the traditions from which they sprang.
We as Catholics can perhaps take courage, in our current social context where
defacement, cynicism and utilitarianism in the arts hold sway, that the head of the
Catholic church sees art as being a way to truth as it was considered for so long to be:
BRESSANONE CATHEDRAL
“Christianity is a rational art… I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the Truth
of Christianity – heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge”. (A
sermon given in 2009 at Bressanone).
Perhaps the queues outside the National Gallery for the Leonardo exhibition earlier this
year can teach us something – that great art and the truths that are revealed by it has lost
none of its power – it remains for us as a society to reconnect with the source of that
power in order to find meaning for the future.
I acknowledge the scholarship of Joseph Rykwert in his book The Dancing Column
© Clare Hornsby 2012