Art and the Church

Contents Updated: Friday, February 02, 2001

• Art and Religion
• Christ and Apollo
• The Age of Faith and Ugliness
• The Cathedral Builders
• The Painters of the Renaissance

Art and Religion

The virtuous Christian whether taught by Jesuits or evangelists will often adopt a look of piety when they think of the Middle Ages when saints were in the anchorage of every church, Hildegard of Bingen or Catherine of Siena were seeing God directly and churches were decorated with damask and velvet, marble and gilding—all to the glory of God. The religion of the Middle Ages inspired these symbols of veneration and beauty. Never mind that it was a time of ignorance, strong ale, vulgarity, filth, intolerance, and burning flesh. We should suffer a little physical charing for religion to sear the heart and fire the imagination!

Jospeh McCabe, the turbulent Catholic priest, invites them to admit reason for but a short while, and promises the faithful will never open a Christian book again. Persuade a reasonable person to read a Christian book and they will toss it aside in disgust. This is not due to any imbalance, prejudice or lack of objectivity. Reason demands rationality and these books are irrational. Once anyone comes to the conclusion based on their experience that reason brings results whereas superstition brings fear and misery, there can be no equal assessment of the two poles. That is not being unfair. Modern apologetic, with its distortions, suppressions and antiquities, cannot reasonably defend the Churches. Those who pretend to the vulnerable that it can are charlatans and emotional bloodsuckers.

It is true that the medieval cathedrals are wonders of artistic and practical skills and ingenuity, but they are not the work of God, but of human beings. The beautiful frescoes of the Middle Ages are infinitely better than the houses cast in concrete or fish preserved in formalin that pass as art today, but they too were the products of human endeavour. New schools of painting, architecture and sculpture will pass away leaving a memory only of faddishness and media hype, while medieval achievements will remain to enthral and uplift saints and sinners alike. The question is what was the role of the Christian religion in particular in inspiring this art. Christian bishops certainly commissioned it—they had the wealth to do it, but would it have been done if the religion had been different?

Moslem architecture such as the mosque at Cordova, the palace at Seville, the Alhambra at Granada, to highlight Spain only, shows that Moslem architects could produce equally beautiful buildings even though they were different. What was the common inspiration in the Moor and the Christian? Obviously not Christianity.

No one disputes the supremacy of Greek architecture, sculpture, and literature. Cretan civilization produced artefacts as fine as anything produced in the Middle Ages over 2000 years earlier. Egyptian art is older and no less beautiful, inspiring Eupopean fashion in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century. The production of imperial Rome matches in beauty the creations of Christian Rome, and are superior to anything produced in the Rome of the Popes for more than a thousand years. The art of India, China, and Japan could also be cited. Where was the Christian religion to inspire all of theis wonderful work?

Consider too how long it took Christianity to inspire architecture and sculpture, then painting, then poetry and finally music? Music, eminently subject to religious inspiration, seemed not to flower until peculiarly late, and, if it be argued that earlier work has been lost, one wonders what then was its merit that no one cared to preserve it. When wealthy patrons began to commission the great masters of religious music of the last few centuries, often they did not employ Christians. On this basis it is difficulkt for any Christian to argue that their religion has been much of an inspiration, though it has been some.

By the Middle Ages we understand the time from about 500 to 1500 AD, when science was reborn, printing became common, Nature was rediscovered, and the Reformation began. Now, unless you have a scholarly interest, not a building, a picture, or a statue in Europe belonging to the first half of that millennium is of any artistic merit. They are valuable when they are found because they are rare and are of historic not artistic interest. The spectacular buildings belong to the thirteenth and later centuries, the dramatic frescoes to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, mainly.

When religion was most profoundly and generally believed, in the first part of the thousand years of the Middle Ages, was artistically barren. Only when the modern spirit began to invade the Middle Ages did great art appear. The artistic inspiration of Europe began when the the first sparks of rebellion against Christian suppression were ignited. The church burnt people in retaliation. During the three centuries of religious creativity, the church murdered hundreds of thousands and tormented millions.

The Christian will suddenly become amazingly liberal and tell us it is religion in general that inspires art. Athens and Egypt are famous for their temples and their temple decorations. The marble statues purlpoined by Christian “collectors” were effigies of gods and goddesses. “Religion has been historically the great fountain source of art,” we are repeatedly told—by the religious.

No, or few, historians of art would support this statement. The truth is that religion has been a great employer of art, because churches get rich out of the mites of the poor. Religious art is not a testimony to religious inspiration but to the religious oppression of poor and ignorant people since time immemorial. Religious writers, not historians of art, make the dogmatic statement that religion inspires art, and add that the Christian religion inspired medieval art.

Organized and wealthy religions employ the artist, whose creations have a religious character. Beethoven and Mozart are sung in the Catholic churches of America today, and both artists were apostates from the Catholic faith when they wrote the music. Pinturicchio, a skeptic, painted the pretty mistress of Pope Alexander VI (for the Pope, in the Vatican) as a modest and demure Virgin Mary. Fra Filippo Lippi, as amorous a monk as lived, which is not to exaggerate, painted the most correct religious pictures. When classical nudity became acceptable again, it was no less necessary for women to model themselves on the Virgin Mary. Consequently, finely executed statues and paintings of demur young women in various stages of their private grooming are of prostitutes, the women the artist could persuade, through charm or a fee, to take off their clothes.

Joseph McCabe cites Faure as attributing the decline of Athenian art to intellectualism. A nation’s time of high artistic creativeness comes at a relatively early stage of its development. Athens artistically decayed when its philosophical period opened. Egypt had artistic periods of distinction only after periods of confusion and rejuvenation. Great art accompanies religion because it occurs when religion still dominates the majority, though the love of beauty and technical excellence may be conservatively maintained, as in China, Japan, and India. Art decays when religion decays because intellectualism replaces both, not because it has weakened art by destroying religion. The law holds good generally, of Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, besides those already mentioned.

For more than half of the Middle Ages, religion abounded but great art did not. As the wealth of the church accumulated and its basis declined, commissioned art began to flourish. Cardinals and bishops had the money to employ art and had lost any pretence of humbleness that they might have had. The eastern tribes that had entered the Roman Empire had settled and become the modern nation states. They became civilized and committed their vigour and imagination to art, as new nations seem to do.

A nation has a golden age of artistic creativeness, and it comes at the beginning of the full development of its civilization. The Persians in a relatively short time were typical of this. Their greatness was concentrated in their first two main rulers, Cyrus and Darius. Monumental architecture and sculpture was greatest and the religion of Zoroaster was most pure under these monarchs. As these successful kings attribued their success to the blessing of Ahuramazda, they gave their best resources to the thanking him. Though they did not build temples or statues of the god, their art still served their religion. The next phase of civilization destroys religion and enfeebles the artistic inspiration.

Dr. Franz von Reber, a Catholic art-director, writing in the heart of Catholic Bavaria, has no reference to religion in his review of European art, except to notice that Christianity was antagonistic to art. In a sheltered area of Europe in the eleventh century architecture first reached distinction. By the thirteenth century most parts of Europe were settled and prospering, and the age of architecture and sculpture began, and the age of the great painters opened. An aspect of this creative period is that the laity wrested art from the monks and made it human, even though religious.

Christ and Apollo

Pure and primitive Christianity scorned art. Jesus said that the end of the world was near. The gospels were written so long sfter Jesus that we cannot accept any particular word or deed attributed to Jesus, yet this idea of the speedy approach of the end of the world is so characteristic, and it so strongly tinges the whole ethic ascribed to him, that it seems reasonable to believe that there was an historical Jesus, an Essene, warning men to meet the coming judgment in purity and poverty. Could anything be more widely removed from the Dionysiac urge, the Apollo spirit, of the Greeks? What had such communities to do with art?

The Protestant Reformers aimed at a stern and bare meeting places to express a return to the manner of the Nazarenes. They were worshipers of God, not of Apollo. The Catholic church was a Pagan version of Christianity, warm, artistic, pleasant and stimulating, whereas they believed the Protestant chapel was cold and uninspiring. Ritual is fossilized religion. Vestments and incense and candles are evidence of low religious vitality.

When the Hellenized Jewish followers of Jesus found themselves living amongst the Pagan crowds of the Greek and Roman cities, some distrusted and disliked the art they saw as an important aspect of Pagan religions. The Roman religion was not a matter of sentiment. There might have been a degree of awe in the state occasions that purported to be religion, and a degree of devotion in the Roman pietas regarding their paterfamilias, but the two were separated. Gods had their offering of incense, and priests in becoming costumes paid the communal respect to them for the good of the Emperor who stood for the city and the Roman world. Without art all this would have been insipid, so the temple was a museum of art. Every sense was gratified. Even the nostrils were tickled. The room was full of beautiful statues, pictures, altars and odors. The mysteries gave a sense of rebirth and future salvation but with the same sensuous trappings. In art, the Middle Ages had already set in when Constantine robbed the arch of Titus to decorate his own, and when the temples were plundered by Christian mobs. The victory of Christianity was a chapter in the story of Roman decline.

Christianity and the general debasement of art worked together to destroy that perfection of form which is central to great art. The golden age of classical art was over when Christianity spread. The Pagan religions employed art to evoke a sensuous response in worshippers, and primitive Christianity resisted this. From the Jewish religion, and perhaps particularly Essene puritanism, it had inherited a great distrust of images. They also had condemned the temple and the sacerdotal responsibilities of the Sadducee class. Christianity stood for repentance and then an utter simplicity of life to avoid temptation before being recieved into God’s imminent kingdom, when the world would end and be renovated for the pure and righteous. Titillation of senses was a contamination. Art served the devil.

The Emperor Severus Alexander, who died in 235 AD, had a bust of Christ in his private chapel. Was this his personal idiosyncrasy or were Christians beginning to accept religious images 200 years after Jesus had promised his generation that he would return to them? Probably the former because the Fathers were severely against art. The most liberal scholar of the early Church, Origen, wanted to have painters and sculptors excluded from the Christian body. The failure of the god to appear meant the faithful had had to turn to regular forms of worship. The messianic meal that was the Last Supper had already been converted into a ritual of commemoration with priests dressed ceremoniously.

The bodies of the dead could not be just thrust into their niches in the catacombs. The Christian community began to paint or carve to decorate graves and walls. Nevertheless, the religion remained anti- artistic, anti-sensual. There was no veneration of Mary, and the legends of fair girl-martyrs—in fact most of the more picturesque legends of the martyrs were not forged until centuries later.

During the first three centuries, Christians might have had little chance to encourage art, but its principles were against art anyway. No expert writer on art could fail to notice the teaching of Christ was a severe asceticism, hostile to art. The senses were the devil’s avenues to the soul and so had to be starved.

When the persecutions ceased and the emperor was converted to Christianity, the new religion suddenly had liberty of worship, large crowds of worshipers to house, and great wealth with which to build. The injunction of Jesus that his followers should forsake the temple to worship God in spirit only did not suit the bishops. Christians have ignored it ever since. The Church had already developed the idea of the mass and of the consecrated caste of priests, and the priesthood had the instinct of self-preservation—an instinct it still retains.

With the gold of Constantine and his successors, the Church built large churches called basilicas, public meeting halls. The main architectural idea was to avoid the model of the Greek or Roman temple. Concessions were nevertheless made to human nature and to the ambitions of the priests themselves. The basilicas were impressive, handsome structures, though of simple architectural style, but often richly and colorfully decorated.

The Church had begun to employ art but gave it no inspiration. Rome was at the time a glorious city, with miles of beautiful marble temples, public buildings, triumphal arches and colonnades, and this early Christian art was beneath its peers. The Church was not yet able to compel the Pagans to join it. They had to be attracted, but the story of Jesus rather did the opposite. The Romans shrank from its bleak asceticism, so the artist had to be introduced.

Toward the end of the century, the Church got the political power to crush all its rivals and enforce its creed by imperial decree on the whole Roman world. There was no longer a need to attract when compulsion would do, so the Church could afford to return to Christ’s ascetism and abandon the allurements of art. By the end of the fourth century, the Church had got so far from Christ that real Christians, like Helvidius and Jovinianus, early Protestants, were condemned and persecuted. Art was now permanently enlisted. Human nature will not long tolerate any religion unless there is a little human nature in the religion. Man makes gods in his own image and likeness.

Historians have bewailed the Church for destroying Pagan temples with all their artistic treasures, but too many have now been inculcated with the concept of respecting religious beliefs that they no longer do. Rather the opposite, they join Christian apologists in absolving the Church of responsibility for this. While Christian historians hold that fewer temples were destroyed, and more adapted to Christian worship, than had been supposed.

In the year 399 AD, the Emperor Honorius ordered that all rural temples should be destroyed, but that those in the cities should be preserved as “civic ornaments”. Twenty-seven years later, the Emperor Theodosius decreed:

All Pagan temples still remaining in perfect preservation are to be destroyed, or consecrated by the sign of the cross.

Few were so consecrated. Only the Parthenon at Athens, because of its prestigious status, was converted into a church. The Serapeum of Alexandria, all the beautiful Greek temples of Diana and Aphrodite, all the greater temples of Rome, were either destroyed or left to decay. Priests and monks, especially in the east, led mobs to the wreck of the fairest buildings, and of the immense mass of art-treasures they had contained only a few fragments have come down to us. Despite this, Christians pretend that their forebears preserved the temple libraries!

Only a Christian can not deplore this vandalism, or can accept it with equanimity while praising God. Christian bishops had taught that the gods and goddesses of the Pagan world were devils, and so this vandalism was inevitable. In destroying the old art, Christianity could not create a new, because it refused and disdained the service of art as long as it was faithful to the Essenic principles of Jesus. Primitive Christianity gave no impulse to the arts, and no one could have expected it from its puritanical and apocalyptic origins. In the fourth century, when it became less Christian and more wealthy, when emperors and courtiers and scholars were attending church, the architect, painter, and sculptor were employed for Christian work.

Perhaps Christian art needed time to develop, but the authorities agree art degenerated during the fourth and fifth centuries when Christians ruled. Under Christianity, the Roman world decayed. While modern Christians can see their religion as nothing other than inspiring, it not onlt failed to inspire and invigorate the Roman world it had just conquered, it was the instrument of its accelerated decline. The greatest Christian work of the time was S Augustine’s City of God. Augustine explains that Christianity did not care two hoots what happens in “the city of men,” mere secular life. Its sole concern was to make citizens of the “city of God,” by teaching them to subdue their sensuous feelings and preserve their virtue. It was no inspiration to artists.

The Age of Faith and Ugliness

In the fifth century, Rome fell. Christian apologists want us to believe the triumph of Christianity made the world more virtuous, honest, refined and cultivated. It did the opposite to such an extent that the ancient power collapsed under its new morality—a morality of aversion to responsibility in this world because a better world called. The catastrophe of the fall of Rome allowed Christian apologists to lay the blame elsewhere, and few people in 1600 years have had the nerve to challenge them.

The mediocre Christian art of the fourth century degenerated. For five further centuries Europe remained, with the exception of Ravenna, a drab, sordid, ugly mass of ignorance. When Rome fell, the emperor chose Ravenna as a residence, and then it came into the possession of emperors of Byzantium. On the coast of the Adriatic, it was the predecessor of Venice as a seaport, allowing it to communicate with Constantinople. The art of Ravenna, the only art of the West before the tenth century, is Greek or Byzantine art. The early art of Venice itself, the magnificent church of S Mark, is Byzantine.

The impartial historian of art will therefore turn to the eastern half of Christendom in order to follow the undisturbed relations of art and Christianity. The rulers of the eastern empire were all Christians from Constantine, its founder, onward. Rival religions were early and thoroughly extinguished. Streams of gold flowed into the veins of the Church, and the Greek Empire was practically untouched by the barbaric invasions. Here we should find an almost pure illustration of the artistic inspiration of the Christian religion.

From the union of Roman enervation with Oriental languor nothing could be born but the long decrepitude of Byzantine Christianity—the trunk was too rotten and the graft too degenerate to bring forth a fair fruit. The evil qualities of Oriental society are evident throughout: luxury, despotism, a superstitious religion, and a slavish obedience to temporal powers.

F von Reber, Catholic historian

Reber acknowledges that early Christianity was anti-artistic, and he does not expect the Church to invigorate this enervated world. If Christianity had really been a civilizing force, which Augustine never claimed it to be, the east might have been less decadent and despotic. Ancient Egypt twice fell into a similar state of decrepitude, and was twice rejuvenated and suffused with energy and artistic creativeness. Ancient Persia was restored, and had a splendid art and culture under the Sasanids, just when the Greek Empire which Reber describes was failing. Christians like to point to the Emperor Justinian, when the church of S Sophia was built at Constantinople, but Justinian was a lawless bandit who bankrupted the Eastern Empire in his spate of conquest and church building. And Byzantine art, as seen in S Sophia and S Mark, illustrates the way the leaders of the Church betrayed the ascetic values of Christ.

Of themselves, Christian ideas would fail to hold the mass of the people. By expressing these ideas in architecture, sculpture, painting, embroidery and music, the Church would buttress the spiritual feebleness of human nature. Neither Christ nor S Paul nor any Father of the early Church thought this, and who would deny that it is the pleasure of the art, not its idea-content, which attracts. So clear was this that the Iconoclasts (image-breakers), in sincere fidelity to the principles of Christ, checked the new service of art for several centuries.

The first notable Christian art, the Byzantine, arose from worldly considerations, and it had so little vital inspiration from religion that it soon degenerated into a technically excellent but lifeless, mechanical and often grotesque depiction of subjects neither divine nor human—elongated, stiff, unanatomical, bloodless saints and Christs, often beautifully painted or carved, seen in the illuminated missals, the altar panels, the crucifixes of the early Middle Ages.

The last traces of antique art were lost in soulless imitation of imitations. Artistic work became from age to age more mechanical and more unreal, losing all appreciation and even pretense of beauty, which quality, in as far as the human body was concerned, was held by the ascetic tenets of the Christian Church not only in disesteem, but in positive condemnation.

F von Reber, Catholic historian

Yet Christians and faint-hearted historians, in one history after another, make conventional reference to the “magnificent service” of the monks to art and culture. Even if these isolated monsteries did this, a religion that makes a desert of a civilized world and then boasts of creating a few oases in it is not entitled to flattery. The truth is most monks—of whom there were millions from the fifth to the twelfth century—did nothing for either art, culture or virtue. A few monasteries spent part of their time in sacred art, and, where the monks were really austere and sincere, the forms they painted or carved or wrought in mosaic, often with exquisite technique, were as far removed from reality and truth as were their religious ideas. The wicked monks and bishops were the ones who encouraged and treasured real art, when their taste rose above the coarsest sensual level.

Persia, the ancient kingdom that inherited the art and culture of Babylon and Assyria, had soon declined and suffered several centuries of the kind of demoralization which occurred in Europe. But the Sasanid kings had raised it to as great a height of vigor and elegance as it had previously attained, and, while the Greek Empire was degenerating under the Christian religion, the Persian civilization was rising.

In the year 636 AD, it fell to the Arabs. The Arabs were then as barbaric as the Goths and Vandals who overthrew the Roman Empire, and their Mohammedan religion so sternly forbade the representation of animal or human forms that their rude inappreciation of art was converted, in large part, into a positive hatred. Yet within a hundred years Persia was raised again, for the second time, to its old level, and the new Arabian-Persian culture became the most famous in the world. The civilization of the Saracens taught the European Christian knights lessons in refinement, and the culture of the Spanish Moors, played an important part in the re-civilizing of Europe.

Writers on history and art lose their historic sense when they write of the successes or the failures of Christianity. They forget the historical parallels which are usually employed to elucidate any phase of human development. Neither the decadence of Greco-Roman art nor the languor of the “enervated” east—for millennia the most vigorous and progressive part of the earth—nor the rudeness of the northern barbarians suffices to explain the failure of Byzantine art or the infinitely worse failure of Christian art in Europe. Every historian apologizes with the continued demoralization of incessant invasions from the north and east of Europe. Arab-Persian art represents just such a combination of enfeebled civilization, barbaric strength, and anti-artistic religion. But a great art was developed, and it was developed, not under the inspiration of the Mohammedan or any other religion, but precisely in defiance of the strict precepts of the religion. When art does at last develop in Europe, it similarly derives from other sources than religion.

The Moorish art of Spain yields another lesson. The visiter to the wonderful mosque at Cordova, built mainly during the very darkest of the Dark Ages of—Europe the ninth and tenth centuries—may be tempted to reflect how religion has inspired art. But it was one of many secular buildings. The Alcazar at Seville, built by Moorish artists, and the Alhambra at Granada, show that royalism was just as inspiring as religion. Both employed the artist. His art was a native human impulse which he expended in the beautification of every instrument and aspect of Moorish life. The mosque and the city-gate, the copy of the Koran and the copy of some lascivious Arab poem, were equally beautiful.

The Cathedral Builders

Our art-authorities agree that Europe was so generally squalid from the fifth to the tenth century that its description as the age of faith and ugliness is correct. Some delicately worked miniatures and carvings came from some monasteries, patient and skilful craftsmanship, but not great art.

Now, the name and personalities of the artists begin to be known, and since they are often religious men—Raphael, Michelangelo—it might be possible to try to dissociate their artistic inspiration from their religious convictions. The general view of historians of the art of the later Middle Ages is that secular or economic conditions promoted it.

Romanesque architecture opened this period of great art, which “attained a higher development just in proportion as it withdrew from the narrowing influence of monasteries”. Luebke adds:

This new spirit, this free movement, is distinctly evident in the various branches of culture. Its dimly discerned but eagerly sought goal was the freeing of the individual from the rule of the priesthood, though only in the limited degree consistent with the religious ideas of the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, revolt against “the rule of the priesthood,” was heresy and could not be “consistent” with religious ideas.

New political and social relations so entirely altered the character of occidental civilization that its products were essentially different. The results of the Crusades certainly did not correspond to the sacrifices which they had required, but they, nevertheless, like a thunderstorm, cleared the heavy and sultry air which had hung over Europe during the later Romanic period. Art was taken by the laity from the hands of the clergy and the monkish communities, and was freed from dogmatic traditions. In poetry, sculpture, and painting, the study of nature was cultivated, and in architecture a greater independence and originality soon made itself felt.

F von Reber, Catholic historian

The church of the clergy was too narrow and too dark, the crowd that was rising with the sound of a sea begged for a church of its own; it felt in itself the courage and the knowledge necessary to build that church to its own stature. Its desire was to have the whole great work of building pass, with the material and moral life, from the hands of the cloistered monk into those of the living people.

Faure

The effect of this was, Faure says in a line: “Christianity, which until then had dominated life, was dominated by it and carried along in the movement”.

The great art of the Middle Ages began with its removal from clerical and monastic to lay hands. Catholics, if they know anything about history, refrain from mentioning the earlier Middle Ages, but call the thirteenth century “the great Catholic century”. It ought to be called “the age of heresy”. It opened with the Papal massacre of the Albigensians, and it set the Inquisition to discover and intimidate heresy everywhere. Yet even at its close, heresy was rampant. Soon, the heresies of Wyclif and Hus would sweep the countries.

The Scholastic movement (a slight revival of learning in Christendom), the rise of secular schools, teachers and new secular literature, the foundation of republics or democracies, the wide rebellion against clerical control in art and thought are closely connected. They are a new anti-Christian spirit in Europe. They assert the rights of human nature. Apologists call the teaching of the Albigensians “anti-social” because they urged celibacy and voluntary poverty. Do they remember who else advocated these as virtues? Christendom had deserted Christ. The Inquisition was let loose, to hound those who would not deny him.

The most successful interpretation of history is the economic interpretation. The invasions of robust and semi-barbaric peoples from the north were over. Danes and Vikings had retired to their homes. Normans or Norsemen had settled in new lands. The nations of modern Europe had taken shape. Industry, commerce, and wealth emerged and led to artistic and intellectual activity.

In the intellectual stirring of the first half of the twelfth century, the provincial schools, the old monastic and episcopal schools at Paris becoming a university, the crowd of independent teachers and their pupils from all parts forming the new Latin Quarter on the banks of the Seine all grow from the new economic conditions. The Church retained control of it, but did not inspire it. Long before the Renaissance, it is its conception.

Though largely an internal economic and political development in Europe, it was stimulated from other sources, especially by the Spanish Moors. What brilliant lessons the Moors gave Europe, and their intermediaries, the propagators of their culture, were the Jews. Christendom owes much to the Jews it treated vilely. The Moslems also influenced Europe through the Crusaders. And Byzantium repeatedly supplied art, even if cramped and degenerate.

The Greeks had come down from the north, semi-barbarians, with their family of gods and goddesses but discovered and displayed a unique and superb art. They made temples for Zeus and Athene and the other Olympians, and carved statues of them, but, though religion was the excuse for the art, it was not the inspiration of it. It merely provided themes. The Greeks had come into contact with the older civilizations, and they made a civilization of their own, just as America did.

Europe begat a new spirit in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but not a new religion. Some architects thought the old Roman architects took shelter in Como during the barbarian invasions, and kept up their traditions there until Europe was settled and called for their work. The descendants of these “free masons” made the Romanesque style from the Roman, and the Gothic out of the Romanesque. Roman trade unions, or Colleges of workers, certainly survived into the Middle Ages and became the Guilds.

The great age of cathedral building opened with the transfer of the art from the monks to laymen, to real artists unfettered by ascetic traditions. Large and rich towns were now growing all over Europe, and the burghers wanted fine churches. Dreamy religious writers love to imagine that the art became great because of the theme. They were to build a “house of God”. It was a religious inspiration. But they were just as “inspired” when they planned the civic buildings of the new burghers. It is the same inspiration in the Clothiers' Hall at Ypres, the Town Hall at Louvain, the Rathaus at Cologne, as in the cathedrals of Rheims and Amiens. The artist will work out any theme appropriately, but the theme does not create the art.

According to all the modern authorities, the Gothic was developed naturally and laboriously out of the Roman through the Romanesque. All sorts of fanciful theories of the origin of the Gothic have been published, and the ordinary person, who knows it only in its finest specimens, the greater cathedrals, is apt to imagine it as a sort of revelation or miracle of religious inspiration. It evolved as prosaically as the automobile. A northern climate demanded a different type of architecture from the south. They wanted more light or larger windows, sloping roofs to ease the masses of winter snow, and so on. In mutual rivalry, cities raised their churches higher and higher, until the strain on the walls became serious, and the flying buttress was invented.

While the earlier or Romanesque style was developed in Saxony, the Gothic was elaborated around Paris. Rheims cathedral is admitted to have been its most perfect example, and has been called “the Parthenon of the Middle Ages”. Yet, it does not compare with the work of the Greeks, the builders of the Parthenon. Its sculptures, though admired, are not free of infelicitities in composition, errors of proportion, and exaggerations of expressions. By the end of the thirteenth century Gothic architecture became too elaborate and degenerated.

The story is one of art, not religion. As the towns grow richer and the civic life more important, the architects are ordered to build Guild Halls, Town Halls and so on. These, where the money is available, are just as beautiful as the cathedrals. Though the inspiration droops and fades just like the inspiration in any other golden age of art, religion remained the same. Indeed, the slaughter of heretics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, must have left more Christians in Europe at the end of the great Gothic period than at its height.

The genius drooped. The new generation was content to imitate and was apt to be too elaborate, and when the Reformation came, when men really went back to the spirit and letter of Christ’s message, art was frozen.

The Painters of the Renaissance

The bourgeoisie had demanded art after their own style, and it had come in aswer to that demand not any by the church. Sculpture followed architecture into the hands of the laity. The saints and saintesses, even the devils and angels and Christ and Mary, became human. A little of the human joy of the more prosperous age was reflected on their features. Human models were used for them, and busts and limbs were rounded. Humanity was breathed into the older sculpture, and it began to rise toward the ancient Greek level. In the sculpture of Michelangelo perhaps it reached that level. Generally, though, Greek statuary was greater,finding its inspiration in the nude human form, in sensual dryads and athletic youths.

Medieval painting is not really medieval at all. Luebke, one of the chief authorities, includes the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in his section in “Modern Art”. Of medieval painters he can mention only Cimabue, Giotto and two or three others, who either clung to the old conventional models or began the revolt against them. They are, he says, “the heralds who announce the dawn of a new day”. But the new day, with all the great painters whose names are familiar to everybody, belongs to modern times, the painters of the Renaissance, who flourished in the least religious part of the Middle Ages. Luebke says:

During the Middle Ages the creations of art had been very largely controlled by traditional—chiefly ecclesiastical—habits of thought.

Up to the middle of the thirteenth century, painting and sculpture in Europe has been described as the painting and sculpture of children. After the thirteenth century, painting “emancipated itself from priestly dictation”. It was in the least Christian and most immoral period of Italy that “the highest beauty, which the gods themselves had, two thousand years before, revealed to the Greeks, now revisited earth among the Italians”. There be no more scathing comment on the Christian claim that Christianity inspired great art.

J Addington Symonds, in The Renaissance in Italy says:

Painting in the earlier period suffered from a barren scholasticism. [It consisted of] frigid reproductions of lifeless forms, copied technically, and without inspiration, from debased patterns.

The next step was that the artist “humanized the altar-pieces and cloister frescoes,” and “piety, at the lure of art, folded her soaring wings, and rested on the genial earth”. So say all the authorities, while petty controversialists and pious writers would have you believe that it was art which soared at the lure of piety. Confronting the great art of Raphael and Michelangelo, both Christians giving superb or exquisite form to Christian ideas, Symonds still ascribes their inspiration to their humanity, not their religion:

For the painters of the full Renaissance Roman martyrs and Olympian deities were alike burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beautiful and the human.

Painting remained stiff and unnatural long after architecture and sculpture, because, its dependence upon the libraries and schools of the convents was much longer continued than was that of architecture and sculpture. The revolt—the approach to nature and life—began with Cimabue, who, being a pioneer, did not lead it far. His pupil, Giotto, the founder of the Florentine School, first, about the end of the thirteenth century, boldly “substituted his own observation of nature for outworn forms”. If he had to paint a S Joseph or a S Peter, he did not look up the conventional figures in illuminated missats or altar-panels, but brought to his studio a burly Florentine carpenter or fisherman.

So the new note was struck, and it slowly reverberated through Italy. Florence now afforded the material conditions of art: wealth, sensuality, and a wholesome skepticism. Other Italian cities overtook it, and had their schools of painters. In the fifteenth century Constantinople fell to the Turks, and hosts of Greek artists fled to Italy. The Renaissance—the Rebirth of classic art as well as literature—set in, and enforced the humanizing movement. Most of Europe was successively lit up, and a great literature or a great art appeared in many countries.

Pictures for the new beautiful churches, for popes and bishops and abbeys, were the most in demand and the most profitable, so that the painters of the earlier period have chiefly occupied themselves with sacred subjects. The artists did not paint a Virgin-and-Child, a Nativity, a S Lawrence, because they felt a religious urge or inspiration in them, but because they were commissioned to paint them. The life of each of the great artists of the time is a series of journeys to execute commissions. If a secular ruler, a cardinal, or a pope wanted his portrait painted, the inspiration was just the same.

The only point that any informed person can seriously raise about the relation of these artistic geniuses to religion, apart from the obvious fact that religion employed them, is to what extent in certain individual artists the Christian faith increased or enhanced the inspiration. Small as a restricted claim like this would be—relatively to the foolish common boast that “Christianity inspired medieval art”—no authority on art would admit that Raphael or Michelangelo would have done less princely work if the fashion of painting or carving sacred subjects had passed and they were confined to mythology and life and history. The painters of the Renaissance who did actually paint mythological scenes and contemporary life painted to the height of their faculty just as the religious painters did. Even Fra Argelico, being an artist of genius, would have put as much inspiration into the painting of the improper frescoes on the walls of certain houses in Pompeii, had that been his task, as he actually infused into the pious frescoes in the walls of his monastery.

The period, the whole complexus of circumstances, evoked a succession of great artists, and they painted what their clients wanted. The same artists painted what are called obscene and what are called sincerely religious pictures. Fra Filippo Lippi, the renegade monk, did a very large number of beautiful paintings on the walls of churches. Why not? He merely, says Luebke, “placed sacred images and events on the footing of everyday life”. He could, as well as any, give his saint the ecstatic expression or give his Christ the proper air of majesty. Botticelli, whose religious pictures are famous, painted Pagan myths and allegories no less beautifully. Pinturicchio, notoriously immoral and skeptical, has left a superb fresco in the Vatican of Pope Alexander VI (as immoral as himself) worshipping the risen Savior with an expression of piety that could hardly be surpassed. And on another wall of the Vatican there used to be a most tender and devout representation of the Virgin Mary which was a portrait of the damsel who at the time was the Pope’s mistress, wantoning with him in the Vatican every night.

The Roman School of painting—of painters who were not Romans—was one of the latest. The center of Christendom had no great art until it became semi-Pagan. A series of Popes, when they were not themselves immoral, surrounded themselves with utterly corrupt courts, and “inspired” the great art of Rome. The funds for the work were derived from the most unscrupulous exploitation of the superstitions of Europe. Under these immoral Popes, in an atmosphere of unbounded license and semi-Pagan ideas, Botticelli, Ghirlandajo, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Raphael, and Michelangelo worked. Without that atmosphere Rome would never have become the museum of art that it is. Aphrodite, Apollo, and Dionysos had more share than Christian ideas in the production.

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