This is the first of six posts on the mathematics of beauty1: the traditional body of knowledge, running from the ancient Greeks through the Church Fathers and into the design of Western art and architecture, which held that beauty has a mathematical structure and that this structure can be studied, learned, and applied. It was a standard part of an artist’s and an architect’s formation for centuries. Today it is virtually unknown, and I think its recovery is essential if we are to build beautifully again.

As six posts devoted to a single subject is a lot to post on consecutive weeks, I will post them on alternate weeks.

In this first post, I want to establish the problem by looking at some buildings, and to say something about how this tradition relates to natural science, which is the other great tradition of describing the world by number. The posts that follow will set out where the tradition came from, what it consists of, how it is used in practice, why it was abandoned, and what its recovery would mean.

If you examine almost any building constructed since the Second World War, the chances are that it will conform to one of two simple guiding principles of architectural design, and in both cases, the results are often bad. These two principles are even spacing and random spacing. The first generates visual monotony; the second generates visual cacophony. I have chosen these terms deliberately to set them against what traditional architecture always sought to achieve instead: harmony.

The goal of an architect working within the traditional approach was to create visual harmony through the appropriate proportioning of parts. This harmony is achieved by relating parts of differing magnitudes so that there is a discernible conformity to a pleasing pattern. The intention was for the pattern of the building’s parts to reflect, or in philosophical language to participate in, the beauty of the cosmos. For the Christian, if his work participates in the idealized beauty of the cosmos, it participates in turn in the pattern of divine beauty itself, for God is the Creator who made the cosmos and left his mark upon it. And it was always assumed that this beauty could be expressed mathematically. This assumption is captured in a famous passage from St Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, written in 1259:

Therefore, since all things are beautiful and in some way delightful; and since there is no beauty or delight without proportion; and since proportion resides first of all in numbers, all things must involve number. From this, we conclude that number is the principal prototypical form in the mind of the Creator, and in creatures it is the principal vestige leading to Wisdom. [St Bonaventure: The Journey of the Mind into God, Chapter II, S,ection 10.]

The traditional mathematics of harmonious proportion has its origins in ancient Greek mathematics and was used, in one form or another, as the foundation of design in art and architecture in the Christian West, largely unquestioned, until the modern period. Around the end of the 19th century, architects, artists, and composers who considered themselves part of the avant-garde began deliberately to reject traditional forms as part of a wider rejection of traditional Western values, and by the mid-20th century, the mathematics of beauty as a principle of design was no longer taught and is today largely unknown.

An understanding and appreciation of the traditional mathematics of beauty are, in my view, vital to re-establishing a culture of beauty today. A deep grasp of these principles will allow architects who do not wish to conform to the anti-Western, anti-Christian orthodoxy of the modern age to create works of art and architecture that are simultaneously beautiful, traditional, contemporary, and innovative. These attributes are not, as some might suspect, mutually exclusive.

Two Ways of Describing the World by Number: Analysis and Synthesis

Before going further, it is worth addressing a question that will occur to many readers. If beauty has a mathematical structure, how does the study of that structure relate to the other great tradition of describing the world by number, which is natural science? The two are not rivals. They are complementary approaches to the same created order, and both rest on the same foundational assumption: that the world is intelligible to the human mind and ordered according to number. That assumption is not a modern discovery. It is stated plainly in the Book of Wisdom, where it is said of God that he has ‘ordered all things by measure and number and weight’ (Wisdom 11:20). The natural scientist and the student of the mathematics of beauty are both, in different ways, taking that verse seriously.

Where they differ is in method, and the difference is best described as one of analysis and synthesis. Natural science proceeds characteristically by analysis. It isolates a part of the cosmos and describes it in detail; where it cannot describe what it has isolated, it isolates something smaller still, and then, by inductive reasoning, concludes that the whole behaves as its parts do. This has proved an extraordinarily powerful method, and I do not raise the point in criticism. It is the right method for its object. (It is worth noting in passing that the assumption behind it appears to break down at the quantum level, where the whole is not, so far as we can tell, simply the sum of its parts; but that is a subject for another discussion.) The traditional mathematics of beauty works in the opposite direction. It is a principle of synthesis. It orders the parts to the whole, helping us to describe the relationships between things and their relationship to the totality of which they are members. Science takes the whole apart to understand it; the mathematics of beauty puts the parts together so that the whole is well made.

These two movements of the mind are not in opposition, and in practice they depend on one another. The impulse to analyze does not arise from analysis. It arises from curiosity, and curiosity arises from awe and wonder at the beauty and order of what the scientist is looking at. And at the far end of the process, when the analysis is complete, scientists routinely take the beauty of a solution as an indication that it is likely to be true. Neither the beginning nor the end of scientific work is itself an act of analysis. Both are acts of aesthetic perception.

There is a further point, which concerns the symbolic dimension of number. The mathematics of beauty, as I will describe it in these posts, treats number not only as a quantity but also as a sign. In doing so, it connects the mathematical order of the universe, however that order is described, to what lies beyond the physical. This does not undermine natural science or contradict any of its findings, and it does not ask the scientist to accept anything his own discipline forbids. What it does is add a dimension of meaning to what he is already doing. A scientist who understands his equations as descriptions of an order that is itself a sign of its Author is doing exactly the same science as one who does not, but he is doing it in a world that makes sense. I return to this comparison at greater length in the final post of the series.

We Recognize Traditional Harmony and Proportion When We See It

Ask a random selection of people what they know about the mathematics of beauty, and you are likely to get blank stares. On the other hand, show them a selection of buildings and ask which ones they would prefer to live in, work in, or pray in, and most will pick the designs that incorporate traditional harmony and proportion, provided that your sample group is not dominated by people whose training in art, music, or architecture at a modern university has instilled in them a deep distaste for traditional forms.

To demonstrate, consider two cities: Oxford and Florence. Both have a large number of traditionally proportioned buildings in their historic centers and many modern buildings, often fulfilling the same functions, on their outskirts. According to the respective city websites, Oxford attracts something like 9 million visitors annually, and Florence slightly more, around 10 million. The vast majority of tourists to either city go to see the older buildings in the center, not the newer ones on the periphery. While historical interest draws many, the beauty of the buildings and the overall environment they create is the real attraction. Whether they know it or not, visitors are responding to the traditional design principles that govern famous buildings such as the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford and the Duomo in Florence.

Harmony: Ditchley House

Once we know what to look for, we can usually recognize traditional proportions. Consider first Ditchley House, built in 1722 in Oxfordshire, England:

Ditchley House, Oxfordshire, built 1722. A classic example of harmonious proportion in Georgian architecture. [By jeffjarvis - originally posted to Flickr as ditchleyfront2, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6249801]

What we see here is a classic manifestation of visual harmony: like a musical chord comprising three different notes, each story has a different magnitude, and the combination is, to my eye at least, pleasing. If it pleases you, too, then you are responding to the traditional mathematics of beauty. The architect who designed this certainly intended to employ these principles.

Monotony

Contrast this with the following building, a multi-story parking garage built more recently, in which every story is evenly spaced.

Multi-storey car park. [Attribution: By cs:ŠJů – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9390088]

I would characterize this building’s design through another musical analogy. It is a visual manifestation of a string quintet in which five identical violins play the same note. However clean and pure that note might be, however perfectly rendered, it quickly becomes dull. It is, quite literally, monotonous: the word means ‘one tone’ or ‘one note.’

The building below operates on the same design principle but on a grander scale, producing the visual equivalent of a vast Mahler-scale orchestra consisting of a single instrument: a hundred violins all playing the same note. Replicating that note a hundred times does not make it less monotonous. When it is blasted at us through a megaphone, as it is here, we cannot ignore it, and it obliterates whatever might be beautiful around it. It becomes aggressively bland to the point of being offensive.

Crossways Estate – an example of visual monotony achieved through even spacing at scale.

Cacophony

Here is an example displaying a different design principle:

The Wotruba Church, Vienna. Could you guess its purpose before being told?

It is a church in Vienna. Even more surprisingly, this random design was reportedly inspired by a visit to Chartres Cathedral. It is difficult to see how exactly, unless the architect was inspired to create something as unlike Chartres as possible. The randomness of its dimensions is the visual equivalent of cacophony in music: random, unharmonious notes played together. It could not be further from the design principles of Chartres.

Does this building speak of the most noble activity a person can engage in? Does it look like a building made to house chant, polyphony, and the worship of God? I would say not. The piece of music that best corresponds to its design, as far as I can think of, is Stockhausen’s Helicopter String Quartet. See what you think…

Next time I turn to where the tradition of harmonious proportion came from: how the ancient Greeks analyzed beauty in the world around them, how their findings were taken up into Christian thought by St Augustine and Boethius, and what the terms ‘ratio’ and ‘proportion’ actually mean in this context.

An Illustration of How Sacred Art Can Inform the Profane

The Baroque period of the 17th century saw the flourishing of a whole new Christian culture. Beginning in Italy and closely associated with the liturgy as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, it gave rise to a flourishing of art, architecture, and music, both religious and secular, across much of Europe, in Catholic and Protestant countries alike. I contend that beauty drove this cultural spread. These works of art spoke powerfully and irresistibly to the people of their age, and patrons and buyers decided they wanted art like this in their homes and churches. We can look at one part of this cultural movement, painting, as an example of what happened more broadly. The portraiture, still lifes, and landscapes of the period reflected the stylistic elements of Baroque sacred art described in the previous chapter, adapted and developed for each genre.

Portraiture

Here is a portrait painted by Anthony Van Dyck when he was just 21 years old, around 1620, and still working in the studio of his master, Rubens.

Anthony Van Dyck, Portrait, c. 1620.

In this painting, the contrast of light and dark is present, as is the variation of focus and the muted color palette. However, there is one key difference from the sacred art described in the previous chapter, arising from the nature of the subject. This is a portrait, not a painting of a saint. A portrait, unlike sacred art, seeks to represent a likeness of the person, strongly emphasizing his uniqueness. Sacred art, as we have discussed, seeks instead to emphasize what is common to all humanity, so that we can emulate it. We discern what is unique about a person primarily from the facial features and especially the eyes. It is through the eyes that we most readily perceive an inner life; we notice the dampness of the eyeballs, the tensions in the muscles that control the eyebrows, the angle of the lids, and so on. There is truth in the traditional proverb that the eyes are the windows to the soul. After the eyes, we look to the mouth, and then to gesture, especially the gesture of the hands.

The sacred artist working in a naturalistic mode will rely more on gesture to communicate mood. The portrait artist, by contrast, seeks to illuminate the mood and unique qualities of the person’s soul through a strong focus on the face, and particularly the eyes.

Still Life

Still lifes, like portraits, were painted by both Catholic and Protestant artists during this period. The example shown here is by the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, who worked in the 18th century. His Still Life with Peaches, a Silver Goblet, Grapes, and Walnuts exemplifies the characteristic Baroque approach. We see the variation in focus, coloration, and tone in accordance with the principles described in the previous chapter.

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Still Life with Peaches, a Silver Goblet, Grapes, and Walnuts.

Landscape

Landscapes are more difficult to paint in the Baroque style than portraits or still lifes, for several reasons. First, a landscape is a more complex composition. There will very likely be trees, animals, people, and buildings all working together in harmony to create a unified impression. At the very least, there will be several principal foci rather than one.

The foci, in this context, are those elements that draw our attention most strongly when we look at a scene. Unless we have reason to do otherwise, we tend to look at people first and to linger on them longest, then at the works of human hands such as a farmhouse or a cart, and then at animals and plants. In this respect, our natural interest tends to follow the hierarchy of being.

The best landscapes respect this hierarchy and tend to present all aspects of creation in harmonious relation with one another, typically placing the human figure in the principal focus. The artist’s goal in a landscape is to present the whole as beautiful while emphasizing the properly ordered relationships between things. Sometimes the artist will wish to make something other than a human being the center of interest, as when a herd of cows in a meadow becomes the principal subject. Even then, a cowherd who watches from the sidelines ought to be placed in the composition in a way that acknowledges the superiority of the human being in relation to the animals, even while the animals command the primary interest. This is not an easy balance to strike.

This attention to hierarchy matters in all genres of painting, not only in landscape. When the proper ordering of relationships is represented in visible things, it develops in us the capacity to look beyond the visible and to seek the ultimate being to whom all things point by their very existence, which is God. When everything in a painting is treated with equal interest, or worse, equal disinterest, it not only misrepresents reality but makes that leap of faith toward heavenly things, which should be the goal of every Christian artist, harder for the viewer to take. A successful landscape therefore requires the artist to portray a complex web of relationships between many creatures, presenting each so that it plays its part in the whole without overloading the eye with equal detail throughout.

When Rubens painted his landscapes, he adopted the standard Baroque template, rendering large portions of them in deep shadow or in sepia tones drained of color. It is apparent that what worked so powerfully in sacred art did not transfer to landscape in quite the same way. To me, his landscapes always look as though they are observed from a vantage point deep inside a dark forest.

Peter Paul Rubens, Landscape with a Rainbow.

There is also the extraordinary technical difficulty of painting trees and foliage. To represent even a single tree, an artist must summarize form; he cannot possibly render every leaf and every detail. At the same time, he must indicate sufficient detail, otherwise the result will look like a smooth green sponge on a pole. If, on the other hand, he supplies too much detail by attempting to represent many individual leaves, he risks producing the effect of a green feather duster. The Rubens above also displays this fault, which might be called feather-duster syndrome.

Clouds and open sea are more tractable by comparison. Consequently, some of the most successful landscapes of the 17th century are in fact seascapes. This one was painted by Willem van de Velde the Younger, who lived from 1633 to 1707.

Willem van de Velde the Younger, Seascape, 17th century.

How the Technical Difficulties Were Overcome

While the sacred art of the Academy, the name given to the state-sponsored art school in Paris that came to dominate the style of art across Western Europe, declined during the 17th century, the quality of secular painting continued to develop. Artists steadily worked out how to overcome the technical difficulties of representing natural subjects in oil.

One development was to move beyond gray and sepia as the sole basis for tonal work. While still using selective tonal rendering, artists began incorporating colors closer to those of nature, such as gray-green for foliage. This allowed compositions to escape from the deep shadow that characterized the Rubens landscapes.

In tackling the foliage problem, artists worked out how to select certain areas for detailed rendering, knowing that the observer’s eye would read the whole as uniformly detailed. The approach was to identify where the eye naturally falls in a given composition, then to offer more color and detail in those areas while leaving adjacent areas more summary. A similar technique was applied to the representation of cloth in portraiture. To distinguish velvet from satin, for example, one would select one area, typically where light and shadow meet, for a detailed rendering of texture and color. The rest of the same fabric would be handled with less color and less detail, but in such a way that the balance prompts the eye to perceive the whole as fully realized. Vermeer, working in the 17th century, provides a striking example of this method in the rendering of the carpet in the following painting.

Johannes Vermeer, The Concert, c. 1663–66.

Notice how the coloration and detail vary markedly across the carpet. Some areas in the light are predominantly orange ochre; some areas in shadow are predominantly dark blue; a third portion is painted in a combination of royal blue and brick red with a detailed rendering of the carpet’s design and texture. Until we deliberately examine each section in isolation, the overall impression is not of a patchy surface but of an integrated, fully realized carpet.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875) was perhaps the first painter to master this approach fully in the context of outdoor landscape. The painting below, Ville d’Avray, was painted around 1867.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Ville d’Avray, c. 1867.

Notice how Corot establishes an underlying form, a broad shape for each element, so that we read the whole: a silver-green haze for the willow trees, blue-green foliage in the distance, richer green for the grasses in the foreground. Over this foundation, he has selectively placed light, brightly colored strokes of leaves and flowers catching the light. The closer the elements are to the viewer, the more detail they receive.

Why Secular Art Survived While Sacred Art Declined

It is worth asking why secular painting continued to develop and improve during a period when sacred art was in decline. One reason, I suggest, is that regardless of an artist’s worldview or religion, if his intention in painting a landscape is to capture its beauty, that intention is consistent with a Christian understanding of the natural world. This is why even landscapes painted by artists with no Christian commitment, such as Chinese Daoist painters, may be considered compatible with the Christian understanding of how a landscape ought to be painted.

There are also practical pressures at work. People will not buy landscapes unless they find them beautiful, so the artist who wants to sell his work had better make them beautiful. Similarly, those who commission portraits want a likeness that shows the subject in the best light, as those who love them might see them. These commercial incentives have kept a tradition of representational skill alive in portraiture and landscape even through periods when institutional taste moved in other directions.

This is why, even in the last 100 years, painters working in representational traditions have continued to find patrons. The Italian portrait painter Pietro Annigoni, who famously painted Elizabeth II as a young woman, is one example. Andrew Wyeth in America and William Heaton Cooper in the British watercolor landscape tradition are others. It is worth noting that Wyeth and Heaton Cooper both came from artistic families and had their fathers’ example to guide their formation.

The Lesson for Today

The lesson we can draw from the story of the Baroque tradition is this: when we have an authentic liturgical renewal accompanied by art forms genuinely connected to it, we can hope to see a transformation of the wider culture, just as the Baroque transformed the culture of its own day. We cannot know in advance what the next such renewal will look like, if it comes. But if it does succeed, it will be its beauty, and not the approval of art critics or university lecturers (this one included), that wins the world over.

The Organic Spread of the Tradition

The works discussed in these posts were selected to illustrate the tradition’s principles. Artists of the time did not subscribe to a Baroque manifesto requiring conformity to a particular style; the word ‘Baroque’ did not come into use until much later. The adoption of this style, which spread across Europe, was an organic process driven by the striking beauty of the new form. Patrons saw the art being produced and wanted more. In the context of the time, artists sought not to establish a distinctive personal style but to show patrons their ability to work within whatever was considered the highest and most noble form. The descriptions of a general pattern offered here are, inevitably, generalizations; there are always exceptions, whether artists who consciously resisted the norms or those who lacked the skill to follow the prototype. Even so, when we look back at this period and try to discern a pattern, the degree of conformity to the principles described in Part 1 is striking.

Within this broad conformity, different influences produced distinct tendencies among master artists. Some proponents of what is called Baroque Classicism, including Nicolas Poussin and Annibale Carracci, sought a more classical look, closer to the High Renaissance, which in turn looked to the styles of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration. They produced composite paintings from drawings of models or from Greek and Roman statuary, sometimes presenting biblical scenes anachronistically, with figures in classical dress and hairstyles. These artists also painted scenes from Greek and Roman history and mythology, often intending them to be interpreted as Christian allegories.

Here is an example by Carracci: the Pietà, in which the Mother of God embraces Christ after he is taken down from the cross. The name comes from the Italian word for piety.

Carracci’s work includes the stylistic elements described in Part 1, but he has also consciously drawn on the classical tradition. The classical influence is clearly visible in the putti, the playful, chubby infant figures derived from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. From the 16th century onward, artists widely adopted these motifs in Christian sacred art to represent cherubs, as in the angels described in Scripture, and occasionally to symbolize God’s omnipresence. This convention also gave rise to the modern use of ‘cherubic’ to describe a beautiful, plump baby. The classical influence is also visible in the facial features of both Christ and Our Lady, which are informed by the idealized forms used by ancient Greek sculptors for their gods and goddesses and subsequently by High Renaissance artists for their saints. For comparison, here is the Venus of the Louvre, a Roman copy of an earlier Greek original dating from the 2nd century BC.

Other artists pushed back against Carracci’s method of synthesizing composite designs from numerous preparatory drawings and studies. Instead, they championed a more rigorously naturalistic approach, emphasizing direct observation from life and, where possible, painting straight onto the canvas with minimal preliminary work. Caravaggio became the most radical and influential figure in this tendency, inspiring artists such as the French painter Georges de La Tour and the Spanish school of Baroque Naturalism, whose leading representative was Diego Velázquez. José Ribera, whose work we examined in Part 1, also belongs firmly to this current. While the contrast between the two approaches should not be overstated, both stood within the Baroque tradition, valuing both drawing from nature and selectively modifying appearances to draw out invisible truths; the Caravaggesque painters prioritized raw immediacy and dramatic lighting over classical harmony and compositional refinement. Here is one of Velázquez’s most celebrated religious paintings: his Crucifixion.

Notice that Christ’s face is largely in shadow. In paintings of Christ or the saints, the artist must depict the figure as a distinct individual while also emphasizing the universal human qualities that viewers can emulate. After all, we cannot imitate what is uniquely personal to a saint or to Christ; we can only strive to imitate those virtues we share through our common humanity. For this reason, sacred art tends to place less emphasis on the face alone and instead highlights the whole person. This poses a challenge: how does the artist convey the subject’s inner spiritual state when we typically read emotion and mood primarily through facial expressions? Baroque painters addressed this by using more pronounced gestures, prioritizing what we would today call body language. This accounts for the dramatic style of many Baroque paintings. That is not to say that Baroque artists sought only to convey drama. In this painting, in which a peace that transcends suffering is conveyed, Velázquez gives the stationary torso far greater prominence than he would in a conventional portrait, where the face would dominate.

Sacred Art and Portraiture: An Important Distinction

A common flaw in the work of contemporary artists who attempt sacred art in naturalistic styles is to dress a model in biblical clothing and then paint a portrait. The facial expression becomes the dominant element, and the result, however skillfully rendered as portraiture, looks exactly like what it is: the girl or boy from next door dressed up as Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The effect is closer to a staged Victorian tableau vivant than to authentic sacred art.

Sacred art differs from portraiture in that its primary goal is to emphasize the universal aspects of the human person, so that the way a saint incarnates those qualities in his life can serve as a model for us. Portraiture, by contrast, emphasizes what is unique to the individual. Those qualities, precisely because they are unique, cannot be emulated by anyone else. That is not to say that what is unique to the person is ignored altogether in sacred art; we always access the universal through the particular, and so the saint must retain the characteristics that identify and distinguish him from all others. It is a matter of differing emphasis.

The Middle Ground: Rubens and Reni

The two poles of Baroque style, Classicism and Naturalism, do not look strikingly different to most modern eyes. To the artists and connoisseurs of the period, however, they appeared hugely distinct, and artists in each camp argued, sometimes bitterly, over which represented the most authentically Christian approach. Between the two extremes, a broad spectrum included naturalism and classicism in varying degrees.

Artists generally considered to occupy the middle ground between Baroque Naturalism and Baroque Classicism include Rubens and the Italian painter Guido Reni. The painting below, St James the Greater by Reni, was painted between 1636 and 1638 and represents this balance: the idealization characteristic of the classical tendency is present, but the warmth and directness of feeling are firmly Baroque in spirit.

The Baroque sacred tradition, whether in its classical or naturalistic tendency, produced a body of work of extraordinary range and beauty. It was from this wellspring that the secular art to be explored in future posts would flow, as the same visual principles and habits of perception, formed in the service of the liturgy, found their natural extension into every aspect of the visible world.

Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, identified three authentic traditions of Christian liturgical art: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. The iconographic tradition, which dominated Christian art in both East and West until the 12th century, portrays man as he will be in heaven, transfigured, luminous, outside ordinary space and time. The Gothic, which I examined in earlier posts, straddles the divide between heaven and earth and is best understood, I argue, as the art of the Christian pilgrim, partially transformed by grace yet still journeying. The Baroque is the most naturalistic of the three. It portrays fallen, historical man, in this life, in the full drama of suffering and grace. That drama, and the Christian hope that transcends it, is what Baroque sacred art is fundamentally about.

The Baroque is also the most influential of the three traditions on art more broadly. As the naturalism of late Gothic painting increased, artists began applying the same visual principles to secular subjects, but the Baroque fully established this tendency, creating a tradition in which the habits of observation and perception formed by creating art for the altar extended naturally into wider contemporary culture. A painter skilled in depicting the light of Christ on the face of a saint would bring the same level of skill and insight to a landscape, a portrait, or a still life, not as an overtly religious act, but in the recognition that the beauty of Creation speaks of its Creator.

The Council of Trent and the Origins of the Style

The Baroque style in art emerged in the late 16th and 17th centuries as a powerful artistic response to the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation efforts, particularly the Council of Trent’s directives on sacred images issued at its closing session in 1563. Building on the precedent set by the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which closed in 787 and which defended the veneration of religious images, Trent reaffirmed the importance of art as a vehicle for faith while addressing Protestant criticisms. Concerned that some religious imagery had grown overly complex, indecorous, or inaccessible to ordinary believers, the Council instructed artists to portray the mysteries of the Faith, the lives of saints, and the truths of redemption with clarity, emotional directness, and devotional effectiveness, avoiding lasciviousness (that is, the promotion of disordered sexual desire), doctrinal error, superstition, and anything that might confuse or mislead the uneducated, thereby fostering a more immediate and edifying visual language that helped define the Baroque aesthetic.

It took time for these general directives to be absorbed and manifested successfully by the artistic community. By the end of the century, approximately thirty years later, a coherent tradition was emerging that built upon the finest stylistic achievements of the 16th century.

The origin of the name ‘Baroque’ is not known with certainty. Commentators speculate that it is a pejorative term derived from the Portuguese word for an imperfect pearl, barocco, a description that art historians later applied to the more extravagant examples of the style. I offer another suggestion below by connecting it to the work of one of the tradition’s pioneers, the Italian artist Federico Barocci.

While the primary impetus for this new style was the desire to create a form of sacred art, it very quickly became the standard for all secular art as part of the broader Catholic cultural response to the Reformation. On seeing the beauty of this style, even Protestants decided they wanted to paint in this Catholic manner, and they copied and adapted it to their own needs, developing parallel theological justifications for its use, as happened notably in Holland. The Protestant Dutch artists of the period, among them Rembrandt, painted portraiture, landscape, and still life in this new style.

The power of Baroque beauty was noticed in Protestant England too. Anthony Van Dyck, a Flemish Catholic and student of Rubens, was invited by the Protestant Charles I of England to serve as his court portrait painter and was elevated to the title of Sir Anthony. He was so successful and influential that the English school of portraiture was inspired by him and sustained itself for 250 years after his death. Figures such as Gainsborough and Reynolds were the most celebrated painters of this school. Americans will be familiar with the portraits of the founding fathers, particularly of George Washington by the American artist Gilbert Stuart, which were executed in the style of the English portrait school.

The Origins of the Baroque Style: Federico Barocci

The Italian artist Caravaggio is credited with popularizing the style at the end of the 16th century, but perhaps the clearest early articulation of what became the Baroque was achieved slightly earlier by another Italian, Federico Barocci. Consider this painting of St Jerome by Barocci, painted in 1598.

I have never read a historical account that confirms this, but I have long wondered whether the term ‘Baroque’ is, in part, a play on his name. Barocci’s work from this period certainly bears all the hallmarks of the tradition he was pioneering.

Several features immediately direct the eye to the figure of St Jerome. He is painted with the most naturalistic coloration, is the most brightly lit, and is the most precisely rendered and sharply focused element of the composition. Barocci reinforces this by setting the figure against a background of deliberately restricted tonal range: a single color, sepia, varied only in its tonal values and given almost no detail. The brightest colors in the composition are concentrated in the cloth immediately surrounding the saint. The sharpest tonal contrast runs along the edge of his right elbow, tracing upward along his shoulder to a sharp point just below the right ear, leading the eye steadily toward the face. This contrast is further intensified by darkening the background immediately adjacent to that edge.

The sharpness and clarity of rendering also vary across the painting. The least precisely handled areas are on the periphery; the most detailed are the saint’s face and hands, the two elements through which expression and gesture communicate the person’s interior life. It is through these that the artist portrays the man as a living being with a soul.

Compare Barocci’s painting with this work on the same subject, painted nearly fifty years later by the Spanish artist José de Ribera in 1646. Ribera spent most of his professional life in Italy.

We can see the same stylistic features at work, except that St Jerome’s face is no longer the primary focus. Ribera directs us instead toward the Word, as exemplified by the scroll. St Jerome produced the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, and it is to this that Ribera draws our attention, perhaps underscoring that Catholics hold Scripture in the highest regard, directly countering Protestant accusations to the contrary.

The sharp contrast between light and dark throughout Baroque painting symbolizes both the darkness of evil and suffering in this fallen world and the Light that overcomes it. This visual device embodies Christian hope, which transcends suffering.

Within a few decades, this style of idealized naturalism had become the standard model for new sacred art across Catholic Europe. As with any living tradition, artists retained room for personal variation within its boundaries; some, for instance, incorporated lighter ochres or cool grays alongside sepia in their tonal work. Broadly speaking, however, the style remained remarkably consistent throughout the 17th century, before gradually and subtly declining in the 18th as the rising influences of Neoclassicism and Romanticism began to transform artistic priorities.

Why This Style Works: The Optics of Baroque Painting

The stylistic vocabulary of the Baroque, its variation of tone, color, and focus, is not an arbitrary invention. It takes into account the way we actually look at the world and process visual information in the mind. The image cast onto our retinas is not evenly colored or uniformly focused. It is sharply focused and richly colored at the center, where the cone cells respond to color; it is blurred and effectively monochrome at the periphery, where the rod cells respond only to tonal information. We are not ordinarily aware of seeing in this way, because the eye moves constantly across the scene before it, collecting information. The picture we are actually conscious of is an aggregate of this information, assembled from memory. As we observe the world, we tend to notice sharp tonal contrast and strong color first, and we spend the most time examining these and any other points of greatest interest to gather more visual information about them.

A painting is a snapshot in time, but the mind naturally supplements it with information from memory, drawing on recollections of similar scenes encountered in the past. What we see in our mind’s eye at any moment when engaging with a Baroque painting is therefore more natural to us than what we would experience when looking at an image in which every detail, from border to center, is rendered with equal precision, as in photorealism or some 19th-century naturalism.

The effect on the viewer is to direct the imagination toward God by employing a dynamic similar to that experienced when we respond to Creation with awe and wonder. God made us to look at the world in a particular way so that we might see the Creator in his Creation and delight in both. By delivering visual information in a way that stimulates the same dynamic process of observation, the artist who paints well makes his painting speak of Christ as powerfully through its beauty and style, regardless of the content, just as the cosmos itself does.

Next week, in Part 2, I turn to how the Baroque tradition spread organically across Europe and examine the two great tendencies that developed within it: Baroque Classicism, which sought a more idealized, classical look, and Baroque Naturalism, which insisted on direct observation from life. I will also look at a question that matters practically for any artist working in sacred art today: how does sacred art differ from portraiture, and why does the distinction matter?

Late Gothic: Van der Weyden

The Descent from the Cross by Flemish artist Rogier van der Weyden, in 1435, is a late Gothic work in which the degree of naturalism is substantially higher.

Because the Italian Renaissance was already underway at this time, albeit in its early stages, some classify this style as ‘Northern Renaissance.’ To my eye, however, this remains an essentially Gothic painting. The figures still occupy the middle distance, giving us a sense of emotional distance between the observer and the scene and positioning us as detached witnesses. That quality of detachment, inherited from the iconographic tradition, is the mark of Gothic art even at its most naturalistic.

Fra Angelico

Fra Angelico was a Dominican friar from Fiesole, near Florence. He was aware of the changes in art occurring around him but retained much of the Gothic spirit of his northern contemporaries, such as Van Eyck and Van der Weyden. He was willing to incorporate the new device of single-point perspective into his work but used it sparingly and selectively, depending on the subject matter. I would still place him at the more naturalistic end of the Gothic spectrum rather than as a Renaissance artist, because his figures show no strong influence of classical Greek sculpture. For me, this is still the art of pilgrimage, of the baptized on their journey to heaven.

The Threshold of the Renaissance: Ghirlandaio

A Madonna and Child from around 1470–75 by Domenico Ghirlandaio illustrates precisely where Gothic art ends and something new begins.

Ghirlandaio has placed his figures within a flat architectural surround, as an iconographer or Gothic artist might, but the figures themselves are in a very different style. Their roundedness of form, so unlike Fra Angelico or Van der Weyden, is derived from his study of classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Suddenly, this is more connected and anticipates the styles of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, who followed him, than to the Gothic artists who preceded him. The figures seem ill at ease in the flat background he has given them. The medium he used, egg tempera, gives the image a natural flatness suited to iconography, but it sits at odds with the strongly three-dimensional character of these figures. This inherent tension between the flatness of the medium and the three-dimensional ambitions of the figures is precisely why it is so appropriate that artists of the period moved from egg tempera to oil and began to place figures in settings that enhanced the illusion of depth. Leonardo, whose manner of representing the figure was not dissimilar to Ghirlandaio’s, used not egg tempera but multiple oil glazes that created a sense of plunging depth and space around the figure.

The Development of Sculpture

Sculpture is not forbidden in Eastern and Byzantine Rite churches, but it is rarely seen. This is because the iconographic style is essentially two-dimensional. The iconographer is deliberately seeking to eliminate as far as possible any strong sense of three-dimensional form or depth. Where carvings do appear, they are generally relief sculptures in which the artist cuts into the surface to create a shadow pattern, the form described by the contrast between lit portions and dark shadows, and the result remains far closer to a flat image than to fully three-dimensional sculpture.

Because the Gothic style allows for greater depth and more rounded forms than the iconographic style, it was natural that sculptors began to push outward from the surface. What began as deeper relief carving gradually became, over time, figures that stand free in three-dimensional space. The sculptures shown below, from Reims Cathedral in France, date from the 13th century. They are fully three-dimensional but still attached to the architectural surface; they have not yet escaped entirely to become figures one can walk around, as one might with a 15th-century sculpture. They depict the Annunciation on the left and the Visitation on the right.

The New Secular Art: Portraits and Landscapes

The greater interest in the natural world and the desire to see God reflected in the ordinary things of Creation also led to the development of portraiture and landscape as distinct art forms. Some of what drove this was undoubtedly the vanity of those who now had the means to commission art, but there is also a holy and legitimate interest in the human person as a unique creation of God. This portrait by Jan van Eyck was painted in 1433.

Stylistically, this portrait draws on the same visual language as the sacred art of the time, demonstrating a principle that runs throughout my writing: great art movements begin on the altar. The traditions formed in the service of the liturgy do not stay there; they flow outward into every aspect of the culture.

There is a way of understanding this that goes beyond the merely stylistic. In an earlier post, I described the mandorla, the almond-shaped halo of light that surrounds Christ in icons of the Transfiguration. Its concentric rings represent, for me, the light of Christ reflected outward into the cosmos and human culture. A well-painted landscape, a sensitively observed portrait, a beautifully designed domestic object: all of these, when they participate in the tradition of beauty formed by the liturgy, become outer rings of that mandorla, reflecting something of the light of Christ into every corner of ordinary life. That is what Gothic art, at its best, achieved; and it is why the secular art that grew from it, for all that its subjects were not religious, remained in a deep sense sacred in spirit.

Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, identified three authentic traditions of Christian liturgical art: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Each is a legitimate expression of the Christian understanding of the human person and our relationship to God, and each communicates that understanding through a distinct visual language, thereby promoting prayer and worship among the faithful. The iconographic tradition, which dominated Christian art in both East and West until the 12th century, portrays man as he will be in heaven: transfigured, luminous, outside ordinary space and time. The Baroque, which developed in the 17th century, portrays fallen historical man in this life, in the full drama of suffering and grace. The Gothic stands between them, and it is the art most characteristic of the high medieval period in the West.

What Is the Gothic?

The Gothic is an authentic and distinct style of liturgical art that developed organically in the West from the iconographic prototype. As the change was gradual, any attempt to date its beginning involves some arbitrary choice. Most commentators settle on the mid-12th century, coinciding broadly with the completion of what is generally considered the first Gothic church, the Abbey of St Denis in Paris, in 1144. The name ‘Gothic’ was coined by High Renaissance commentators as a term of contempt. They held it to be a barbaric style belonging to the period of cultural decline that they believed had begun when the Goths overran the Roman Empire in the West a thousand years earlier. Historians today do not generally share that view of cultural decline, but the name stuck. Even those of us who admire Gothic culture and art continue to use it!

The impetus for the departure from the iconographic prototype stemmed from an increased emphasis on the reliability of human experience and the value of information received through the senses. This led to a greater curiosity about and appreciation of the natural world. Such appreciation was not new: Christians had always relied on sensory information and valued the beauty of the cosmos. What was different was the degree of weight now placed upon them.

Tied to this was the conviction that our world, though fallen and imperfect, is nevertheless good, ordered, and beautiful. There may be evil and suffering in the world, and it may not be as good and beautiful as it ought to be, but it remains God’s creation. This appreciation of the natural world and confidence in our ability to know it through the senses sparked curiosity and a desire to observe it more closely. One effect was the rise of scientific inquiry; another, the one that concerns us here, was an increased naturalism in art, a greater correspondence to natural appearances. The devotion to rational inquiry bound up with this cultural movement also led to a new approach to learning and to the establishment of the great universities, among them those of Paris and Oxford.

Several factors combined to produce this cultural shift. Around 1000 AD, the Latin West increased its contact with the Greek East and the Islamic world through trade and warfare, including the Crusades and the Reconquista, the reconquest of Spain from the Moors (Toledo fell, for example, in 1085). This gave Western Europe, for the first time since the decline of the Roman Empire in the West, access to many lost works of classical writers, particularly in the form of Arabic transcriptions of Aristotle. Over the following century, Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars collaborated to translate and interpret these texts. It was the friars, the new mendicant orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who achieved much of the synthesis of the new learning with the tradition inherited from St Augustine and the Church Fathers. The most significant of these figures is St Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican.

This age was characterized by the creation of new ideas and a drive to popularize them. The preaching of the Dominicans and the broad appeal of St Francis of Assisi’s spirituality, which included a love of the beauty of the natural world, led in particular to a wider appreciation of the natural world as part of God’s creation. This shifting worldview, while still firmly Christian, gave rise to cultural movements driven as much by holiness and great artists as by great thinkers.

The New Naturalism

The greater emphasis on direct observation led to an enhanced naturalism fused to an iconographic substrate. What began in the Romanesque period, up to the mid-12th century, as a more naturalistic variant of the iconographic style eventually became so naturalistic that it broke the limits of what had constituted an icon, for example through the introduction of cast shadows and the depiction of figures in profile. Nevertheless, Gothic art always owes something stylistically to the iconographic. It retains, for example, the emotional distance maintained in the portrayal of figures, so that the observer always feels slightly detached from the scene depicted. Even in late Gothic styles, such as those of the Flemish artists Van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, we can see how much they owe to the iconographic tradition.

If one were to characterize this style theologically, it is too naturalistic to be considered a portrayal of man as he will be in heaven, which is what the iconographic style portrays, and not naturalistic enough to be a portrayal of fallen humanity as we experience it in this life, which is the subject of the Baroque. It straddles the divide between the two, much like the Christian life within the Church.

When a man is baptized, confirmed, and living the sacramental life, he is transfigured partially by grace even in this life. We may not see it ourselves, but that transformation is real. We are, to use St Peter’s phrase, ‘partakers of the divine nature.’ But we are only setting out on the journey, and we can suffer setbacks and reversals as well as progress. This transformation is only complete and permanent when we are in full union with God in heaven, but while we are on this pilgrimage to heaven, as part of the mystical body of Christ, practicing Catholics are in this respect Gothic men and women.

It is worth noting that the Gothic age is characterized historically as an age of pilgrimages. Many of the great cathedrals were pilgrimage destinations, and it is, I suggest, fitting to describe Gothic art as the art of pilgrimage for that reason also.

If we wanted a single symbol of this age, it might be the spire of the great Gothic cathedral. The Gothic cathedrals of France and England, perhaps more than any other aspect of the culture, characterize this period. The new learning led not only to a new approach to design, developing gradually from the Romanesque styles that preceded it, but also to advances in structural engineering that enabled the creation of higher, more complex structures with larger windows. These stained-glass windows became works of art manifesting the same stylistic elements as the paintings, but now in the medium of colored glass. The Gothic spire that so often sat atop the magnificent new churches and cathedrals born of an outpouring of faith symbolizes this age of pilgrimage in that, more than any other architectural feature, it seems to span the divide between heaven and earth.

Early Gothic: Duccio’s Transfiguration

We can now look at some examples to illustrate the style’s general characteristics. Consider this painting of the Transfiguration by Duccio.

This painting has many characteristics of iconographic art. Christ, the most important figure, is the largest; the mountain, which in nature would dwarf any of those present, is significantly smaller. Through these differing relative sizes, the hierarchy of being is communicated: Christ is the highest, and inanimate mountains the lowest. There is no scenery beyond what is necessary to the narrative; anything superfluous to the spiritual message is omitted. All the figures have halos, and Christ has gold-leaf lines on his garment, indicating that even his clothes shine with the heavenly, uncreated light. All of this is strongly iconographic.

However, here is the departure: the figure of John in the center is shown in profile. Duccio has done this to visually connect John with Christ. He wants to show John looking at Christ; given that John is closer to us than Jesus, to look at him John would have to turn away, and we would see only the back of his head. Duccio does not want that, so he uses the pictorial device of portraying John looking directly upward, as though Christ were physically above him and both were in the plane of the painting, which forces him into profile. A conventional iconographic portrayal of the Transfiguration would show the central figure, John, looking towards us, and away from Christ in shock, to avoid depicting him in profile.

Lorenzetti’s Deposition

The Deposition from the Cross by Pietro Lorenzetti, painted in 1320 for the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, is a good illustration.

As with Duccio’s Transfiguration, this painting has many figures in profile. This allows Lorenzetti to place them in close proximity to one another, so that each can participate in a beautiful, rhythmical, and flowing design as a harmonious expression of love. While intimacy between two figures can be conveyed in the iconographic style (the Mother of God and Christ are often portrayed cheek to cheek), it is very difficult to show so many figures connected in such an intimate way, each acknowledging the others’ presence, without showing them in profile. This enhanced emotional register is characteristic of Gothic painting generally. The emotion of the figures should be distinguished from the modern concept of ‘self-expression’ or from the artist’s passion. Lorenzetti’s goal is not to tell us what he feels; it is to portray what the figures depicted felt.

Matthew Paris and the English School

Matthew Paris was an English monk who lived at St Albans, in southern England, in the 13th century. We have many examples of his pen-and-ink sketches, which include direct observations of the natural world around him. He also illuminated psalters, including the Westminster Psalter. The image below is taken from a manuscript, the Life of St Alban, depicting Heraclitus taking down St Alban’s head.

His style is characteristic of English art of the period, in which form is described by line almost to the exclusion of tonal description. He controls the quill pen with great assurance, creating smooth, rhythmically flowing lines and varying its darkness and width to draw the viewer’s eye to the most important parts of the composition. The coloration and shading are restrained, which gives his images a symbolic quality appropriate to sacred art. Many wall paintings of this period can still be found in English churches, including St Albans Cathedral itself, that follow this basic structure. Because it is reminiscent of modern illustration and animation art, familiar to and popular with so many people today, this is a form that 21st-century artists could take to easily. It is powerful yet accessible. I teach classes in this style, which I call the School of St Albans, myself.

Next week, in Part 2, I turn to the later Gothic masters: Van der Weyden and Fra Angelico, and the point at which the style begins its transition to the High Renaissance as seen in Ghirlandaio. I also look at how the Gothic’s new appreciation of the natural world gave rise, for the first time, to sculpture as a fully three-dimensional art form, and to portraiture and landscape as distinct genres in their own right.

I posted the previous five articles in this section as a series, in the order I intended them to be read, which means they appear in reverse order on this page. So read them from the bottom up, that is:

1. Science is a Faith - Even for Atheists

2. Does Quantum Mechanics Undermine Materialism? Part I: Determinism, Free Will, and the First Cause

3. Does Quantum Mechanics Undermine Materialism? Part II: Minds, God, and the Beauty of Creation

4. God Always Fills the Gap! The only question is whether he uses natural science to do so

5. Perhaps God Does Play Dice! Uncertainty is Essential To Quantum Mechanics...And So Is a Knowing Mind

I wrote a short summary of the points they make below.

I wrote them because I have been frustrated whenever I hear talks on science and faith, even by believing Catholics. I believe the conventional approach to such discussions, which takes science and reason as the standard, then attempts to show that faith and the arts can (or cannot) meet that standard, has it backward. I am arguing that, in fact, science is inescapably rooted in faith, even for those who consider themselves atheist materialists. I should say at the outset that these articles do not attempt to prove God from physics; faith is a gift, not a deduction. What they offer is something more modest and, I hope, more useful: an assurance that the findings of natural science, honestly examined, give the materialist far less support than he assumes, and the believer far more.

In the first article, I present the full argument that science itself rests on faith. Every scientist must assume, before he begins, that the universe is ordered, that this order is intelligible to the human mind, and that it is describable mathematically. None of these premises can be proven by the scientific method; they must be accepted before the method can operate at all. Historically, they entered Western thought, which is what has driven scientific progress, through Christian theology: a rational Creator makes a rational creation, and makes man in his image with the capacity to read it. The scientist who denies the spiritual is not more rigorous than the believer; he is simply unaware of the credal foundations of his own discipline.

The second and third articles engage the work of the Catholic physicist Stephen Barr on quantum mechanics. The particle physics tells us that individual events at the quantum level- the decay of an atom, the arrival of a photon- are not determined by any prior physical state. Physics can calculate the probability of an outcome, but never the outcome itself, and the mathematics of the theory tells us this is not a temporary gap in knowledge but a structural feature of reality. Barr argues, and I agree, that probability of its nature requires a knower, a mind for whom the outcome is uncertain until it is observed directly, and therefore that mind cannot be eliminated from physics. The implications of this are far-reaching. If a knowing mind is a necessary component at the quantum level, then a non-material cause is operating at the foundation of the physical world, and with that, three pillars of the secular worldview fall together: materialism, which holds that the physical is all there is; physical determinism, which holds that every event is fixed by prior physical causes; and scientism, which holds that science alone gives us truth. This is precisely why the atheist materialist cannot leave the question alone, and his worldview is threatened by the philosophical implications of quantum physics more than any form of physics has ever threatened the worldview of those who believe in God.

In short, one might say that probability concerns degrees of certainty and uncertainty, which presuppose a person who is either certain or uncertain. I extend his argument to ask what resolves quantum indeterminacy across the whole cosmos, where no human observer is present, and suggest that the most coherent answer is the one the Church has always given: God, the First Cause, continuously present to and sustaining every event in creation. I also draw a connection, more speculative but I think one that is suggested by this, between this requirement for a knower and the Thomistic account of beauty, in which claritas, the radiance by which a thing makes itself known, presupposes one to whom it is made known. Beauty is a transcendental property of being - that is, all that exists possesses it -, and so this raises the question of whether all that exists is known in some way.

The fourth article confronts the obvious objection: is this not just another God-of-the-gaps argument, destined to collapse when science closes the gap? My answer is to reject the framing itself. God is the author of the order that natural science describes, so he and science are not rivals competing for the same explanatory territory. God always fills the gap. The only question, in any given case, is whether he does so through natural causes that science can describe or through causes that lie beyond physics. Newton did not displace God from the universe; he described the order through which God sustains it. The quantum case is distinctive because the mathematics itself tells us that no physical cause can be found.

In the final article, I argue that the only way to remove the need for a knowing mind from quantum mechanics is to remove probability from it; without probability, what we have is no longer quantum mechanics but either conventional classical, ie Newtonian physics (which seems very unlikely at this point), or something else entirely, as yet unimagined…or divine intervention! Even Einstein, who resisted the probabilistic character of the theory all his life, insisting that God does not play dice, could not find a way around it.

A point I make in the articles themselves is worth repeating here: as a Christian, I have no axe to grind in this debate. Science may yet produce an explanation that eliminates the need for a knower; it has not definitively done so, but if it does, I will be happy to accept it, for no description of the natural order, whatever it shows, is any threat to my faith, which is neither derived from (nor contradicted by) any scientific evidence. The urgency lies on the other side. The current situation appears to undermine physical determinism, a tenet fundamental to the atheist materialist worldview, and so it is the materialist, not the believer, who needs the gap filled by science. If he cannot do so, for even one observed phenomenon, then his worldview collapses.

Readers of this blog will know that my usual subject is sacred art, and they may wonder what a painter is doing writing about physics. But this series belongs to the same project as everything else I write. My concern has always been the integration of faith and culture, and science is as much a part of our culture as art, music, and architecture. The same Catholic vision that tells us why an icon is painted without cast shadows also tells us that the universe is mathematically intelligible, and that beauty, whether in a Baroque altarpiece or in an elegant equation, is a sign of the divine mind. What makes this approach unusual, I think, is that it treats the scientist and the artist as engaged in the same fundamentally creative and contemplative activity: both are reading the pattern of the divine order and responding to it. This has a practical consequence for how scientists ought to be formed. Scientific creativity depends on an aesthetic sense of the order of the cosmos; it is this intuition of beauty and pattern that generates the initial ideas from which hypotheses are formed, before any testing begins. It follows that scientists would benefit from a traditional formation in beauty, of the kind once given to artists, as part of their scientific training, and I make this case in the series.

Before I was a painter, I trained as a scientist, earning degrees in metallurgical engineering and materials science, and I have never felt the two halves of that formation in tension. This series is my attempt to show why they are not, and why the believer can walk into the laboratory, as into the studio, with complete confidence, and perhaps with greater confidence than the atheist materialist can occupy either. For the materialist must borrow premises he cannot justify in order to do his science, and can give no good account of why beauty should move him at all. The Christian is at home in the laboratory, the studio, and the church alike, because for him they are all rooms in the same house, his Father’s house. The materialist, however brilliant, and I say this as a friendly challenge rather than a dismissal, is in each of them a lodger in separate, unconnected rooms.

I finish with the words of Benedict XVI from his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (in the chapter “Music and Liturgy,” Part Three: Art and Liturgy)

“The mathematics of the universe does not exist by itself, nor, as people now came to see, can it be explained by stellar deities. It has a deeper foundation: the mind of the Creator. It comes from the Logos, in whom, so to speak, the archetypes of the world’s order are contained. The Logos, through the Spirit, fashions the material world according to these archetypes. In virtue of his work in creation, the Logos is, therefore, called the “art of God” (ars = techne!)[...]All true human art is an assimilation to the artist, to Christ, to the mind of the Creator.”

This short article adds one further observation, which has been forming in the background of the previous discussions and which seems worth stating explicitly.

Probability is Not Optional in Quantum Mechanics

The central feature of quantum mechanics, for the purposes of this series, is that at the level of individual particles, physics can only tell us the probability of an outcome, never the outcome itself. This is not a temporary limitation of current knowledge. It is built into the theory at a foundational level. The rule by which probabilities are calculated from the mathematical description of a quantum system is a core postulate of the theory — not an approximation, not a practical convenience, but the mechanism by which the theory connects its mathematical formalism to what is actually observed in experiments. Every experiment that has ever been done to test quantum mechanics — double-slit interference with single electrons, the timing of photon arrivals, the decay of individual radioactive atoms, tests of the correlations between entangled particles — confirms that individual outcomes are irreducibly probabilistic. Remove the probability, and you are no longer doing quantum mechanics.

The irreducible primacy of probability in quantum mechanics was not universally welcome, even among the theory's greatest contributors. Albert Einstein resisted it all his life, famously insisting that "God does not play dice," meaning that no complete physical theory could leave individual outcomes genuinely undetermined; he spent decades searching for a deeper, deterministic account that would restore predictability at the quantum level, and never found one.

This matters because of Stephen Barr’s argument, which I accept and have drawn on throughout this series. As long as quantum mechanics involves calculating probabilities, a knowing mind cannot be eliminated from the picture. Probability is a statement about what a knower can expect. It is not a statement about the world in the absence of any knower; it is a statement about the relationship between a physical system and a mind that will make an observation. You cannot have genuine probability without a subject for whom the outcome is, as yet, uncertain. This is why the measurement problem in quantum mechanics — the question of what resolves a range of probabilities into a single definite outcome — cannot be answered without invoking a knower of some kind. A physical system cannot know its own outcome. Only a mind can.

What It Would Take to Remove the Need for Mind

It follows from this that the only way to eliminate the need for a knowing mind from quantum mechanics is to eliminate the calculation of probabilities from quantum mechanics. But if you do that, you no longer have quantum mechanics. You have something else.

What that something else might be is genuinely open. One possibility is that some future development, scientific or philosophical, extends classical deterministic physics into the quantum domain in a way that renders the probabilistic framework unnecessary. This would be something like a return to the Newtonian picture at a deeper level — a mechanics in which individual outcomes are in principle fully determined by prior physical states. This is very unlikely, given how thoroughly quantum mechanics has been tested and how deeply probabilistic its character appears to be; but I cannot say it is logically impossible. Another possibility is that a third type of mechanics, as yet unimagined, might one day emerge that accounts for everything quantum mechanics accounts for but without the probability. I have no idea what that would look like, and I suspect no one else does either.

What I am confident about is this: any proposal that claims to eliminate the need for a knowing mind while remaining within standard quantum mechanics, with its irreducibly probabilistic core, has not succeeded in what it claims. The Many-Worlds Interpretation is the most prominent example. As I discussed in the third article, it attempts to retain the full wave-function description without any collapse, and so without any observer, by allowing every possible outcome to occur in branching parallel worlds. But as Barr and others have argued, a theory without probabilities cannot make contact with experimental reality, and the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which dispenses with the mechanism by which probabilities are assigned to outcomes, cannot coherently do so. It has been on the table since 1958 and has never progressed from hypothesis to confirmed scientific theory. Taking me lead from Barr’s and Koon’s arguments, I remain skeptical of it, and of any proposal that attempts a similar maneuver.

Openness and Its Limits

My worldview does not depend on quantum mechanics remaining irreducibly probabilistic, any more than it depends on any particular finding of natural science. As I said in the previous article, accepting any description of the natural order by natural science never contradicts faith in God. If some future development dissolved the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics entirely and replaced it with a deterministic account, that would be a remarkable scientific achievement to be celebrated, and it would not trouble me theologically. God fills that gap too.

I would, however, note that the incentives here are not symmetrical. For the atheist materialist, eliminating the need for a knowing mind from quantum mechanics is not merely an interesting scientific question. It is a matter of some urgency. A physics that requires mind as a fundamental feature of reality is deeply uncongenial to a worldview that holds that mind is nothing more than a complex physical process. The pressure to find a solution that avoids this conclusion is therefore considerable, and it is worth keeping that pressure in mind when evaluating proposals that claim to have achieved it.

Motivated reasoning is a human universal, and scientists are no more immune to it than anyone else. Until such a proposal has undergone the full transition to confirmed scientific theory and been tested repeatedly against reality, as standard quantum mechanics has been for a century, healthy skepticism is the appropriate response.

The argument of this series has not been that science proves God, or that quantum mechanics is the only route to him. It has been the more modest claim that the physics, examined honestly and on its own terms, does not yield the materialist conclusions so often assumed to follow from it. The gap is real. A knowing mind cannot be removed from the picture without removing probability, and removing probability means leaving quantum mechanics behind. What lies on the other side of that departure, no one yet knows. Until someone gets there, the world that physics actually describes remains one in which mind is not an afterthought but a structural requirement — which is, I would suggest, rather more compatible with a Christian understanding of reality than its materialist alternative.

Where this debate leads, only time will tell. Until it does, the certainty of the answer remains, to borrow Einstein's image, about as certain as the roll of a dice.

Those arguments have attracted a common objection, which I want to address here. The objection is that I am making a God-of-the-gaps argument, especially in my second article on quantum mechanics. This is an objection that should be taken seriously. But rather than simply defend the quantum argument against the charge, I want to reframe the question more fundamentally. The issue is not really whether God fills the gaps in scientific knowledge. He always does so, as I will explain. The only question is whether he does so through explanations that rest in natural causes that science can describe or through causes that lie beyond what physics can account for.

The Objection

The ‘God of the gaps’ objection runs as follows. When science leaves a gap in knowledge, believers are tempted to fill it with God as an explanation. It argues that inserting “God did it” into the gaps in our scientific knowledge is weak, temporary, and ultimately flawed. As science advances and fills those gaps with natural explanations, the role left for God keeps shrinking. This makes the argument dependent on ignorance rather than positive evidence, and it risks portraying God as a “stopgap” that retreats further with every discovery. People of faith are as quick as those without to raise this objection because they feel that ultimately, such an approach distracts people from genuine arguments for the existence of God.

But this has always been a losing strategy, so the argument goes: every gap once attributed to divine action has eventually been closed by a scientific explanation. The orbits of the planets were once thought to require the continuous intervention of angels; lightning and thunder were thought to arise from the wrath of God or gods; there was thought to be an inherent instability in the system of planetary orbits which God corrected periodically (even Newton thought this), but in each case natural explanations developed by scientists supplanted them. On past performance, the assumption that any gap in scientific knowledge will eventually be filled by a natural explanation seems well-founded; and the assumption that God is the explanation is no more than an appeal to ignorance dressed up as theology.

Stated like this, the objection has real force, and I, as one who believes in God, am not going to deny it. The history of science really has closed many gaps that theology was too quick to occupy, and the serious believer should acknowledge this. It is a mistake to locate God’s action specifically in whatever science has not yet explained, because that implicitly suggests God steps back whenever a natural explanation appears. That is bad theology, and it invites the conclusion that God is shrinking as science advances.

A Better Framing: God Always Fills the Gap

But the usual way of presenting this argument, on both sides, starts from a false opposition. God and natural science are framed as rival candidates for the same explanatory slot, competing to fill the same gap. They are not.

As I argued in the first article, God is the author of the order that natural science describes. The regularity of the natural world, its mathematical intelligibility, its conformity to laws that hold everywhere and always, are not features that science discovered independently of God and then handed back to him as a concession. They are features of a creation that is ordered by a Creator, and they are what make science possible in the first place. Natural science is the systematic description of the order God has established in the world. Its laws are, in that sense, a description of God’s habitual activity in sustaining creation.

When there is a gap in scientific knowledge, therefore, God is not one possible answer among others, waiting to see whether science gets there first. He is already the answer, in the sense that he is the source of whatever order underlies the phenomenon in question. The only open question is whether the order through which he is acting in this particular case is one that natural science can describe, or one that goes beyond what physics can account for. To put it plainly: God always fills the gap. The question is only whether he does so with a natural explanation or without one.

This reframing changes how the God-of-the-gaps objection should be assessed. The objection assumes that invoking God is a way of giving up on finding a natural explanation. But on the account I have just given, finding a natural explanation and finding God’s action are not alternatives. They are different levels of the same description. Newton’s laws did not displace God from planetary motion; they described the order through which God sustains planetary motion. The theologian who says God guides the planets and the physicist who says gravitational attraction guides them are not contradicting each other, any more than saying ‘this painting is beautiful because Vermeer painted it well’ contradicts saying ‘this painting is beautiful because of the arrangement of one, tone and color on its surface.’ Both are true, at different levels.

The Only Real Question: Natural or Non-Natural?

Once the framing is corrected, the genuine question comes into focus. For any given gap in knowledge, we need to ask: is this the kind of phenomenon that is likely to have a natural scientific explanation, or is this a case where even completed physics would not provide one?

As I argued in the first article, until a scientific proposal makes the transition from hypothesis to theorem, what we have are competing hypotheses. A hypothesis is a proposal that a particular phenomenon can be explained in a particular way; a theorem is a hypothesis that has been tested against reality, has been found to predict correctly in domains not previously tested, and has been confirmed repeatedly. The two are very different things, and the language of science tends to blur the distinction. When a scientist says that a natural explanation will surely be found for some gap, that confidence is itself a hypothesis, not a finding. It is also an article of faith - faith in natural science to explain all phenomena - not a theorem, and as such it is no more privileged, in the absence of confirming evidence, than the proposal that the cause is non-natural.

The question of which is more reasonable in any given case has to be decided on the evidence available. And the evidence is not always neutral. For the planetary motions before Newton, the mathematical regularity of the phenomena was already a strong indicator that a natural order-governed explanation existed. Even without Newtonian mechanics, we could have said: these motions are ordered and consistent; their pattern looks like the product of a physical mechanism, not of moment-to-moment non-physical intervention. The believer who invoked angelic drivers was not wrong to invoke God, but he was wrong to conclude that God was not also acting through a natural mechanism that science had not yet described. History confirmed that he was.

It is worth adding a further point about the status of theorems, since it bears on the question of gaps more broadly. Even when science elevates a proposal to the status of a theorem, that represents the highest level of confidence the scientific method can offer, but it does not constitute absolute proof. Theorems remain in principle revisable if fresh evidence demands it, and this means that even where science appears to have filled a gap, that gap is not necessarily closed permanently.

The theory of evolution is a case in point. As a Christian, I have no personal difficulty with the idea that natural selection describes, at least in part, the mechanism through which God brought about the diversity of life; as I have argued throughout this series, he can act through natural causes, and if evolution is the mechanism he used, faith is entirely untroubled by that. But the theory matters considerably more to the atheist materialist than to the Christian, since, for over a hundred years, it has served as the principal natural explanation for the origin of species and has relieved the materialist of the apparent need to invoke direct divine action in the history of life. It has been treated not merely as a theorem but as an unquestionable foundation of biology. Recent developments in natural science are now casting serious doubt on aspects of the theory. I do not say this to suggest that any particular alternative must therefore be true, or that whatever gaps a weakened evolutionary account leaves behind must be filled by God in any direct way. But if the theorem turns out to be less secure than has long been assumed, the consequences are not symmetrical. For the Christian, the loss of a natural mechanism leaves everything intact. For the materialist who has relied on evolution as the answer to the question of origins, the absence at this stage of a viable scientific alternative is a more significant difficulty. The gap, as always, remains. The only question is whether confidence in a natural explanation for it is as well-founded as it has appeared to be.

When the Answer is Not Through Natural Science: The Quantum Case

The quantum case, which I discussed in the previous two articles, is structurally different, and this is why I used it as my main example. Here it is not that we lack a physical explanation for the time being. The mathematical structure of quantum mechanics, as it stands at the moment, itself tells us that the individual outcome of a quantum event is not determined by any prior physical state. As Barr argues, the indeterminacy is not a gap in our knowledge that better instruments or cleverer theory might one day close. It is built into the physics. The pattern of individual quantum events is mathematically inconsistent with any pattern that would indicate an underlying physical cause. Physics does not merely fail to find a cause; its own mathematics tells us there is no physical cause to find.

This is not, therefore, a God-of-the-gaps argument in the usual sense. The gap I am pointing to is not a temporary absence of a natural explanation. It is a space that physics itself, on its own account, says it cannot occupy. In asking what fills that space, I am not appealing to ignorance; I am taking the physics seriously and asking what kind of cause could be operating in a domain that physics has genuinely, and on its own terms, excluded itself from. Of course, the science might develop and fill the gap, but at the moment all we have are two competing hypotheses, and the most reasonable one appears to be that natural causes do not apply and science will not fill the gap.

God fills this gap too, as he fills every gap. The question is how, and on this I argued in the previous articles that the most coherent account is divine action as First Cause, operating through the quantum indeterminacy that physics leaves genuinely open. Free will, as Barr argues, may operate through the same medium in the human brain. Both proposals are reasonable given what else we know. What cannot be said — though it often is — is that it must be a natural explanation, because God does not exist and the physical is all there is. No scientist, as a scientist, can establish that. The assumption that every phenomenon has a natural explanation is a premise of scientific inquiry, not a conclusion of it. To assert it as a proven fact is to commit the error of scientism, which is not a scientific position but a philosophical one, and a self-defeating one, since it cannot be verified by its own criterion.

On the Weaker Parts of My Earlier Argument

I should be honest about the limits of what I argued in the previous two articles. The extension of Barr’s argument about the human mind and free will to God as a universal observer is, I think, the stronger part of my contribution. The further extension — the analogy between Thomistic claritas and the quantum requirement for a knower — is the most speculative. I find it suggestive and consistent with the philosophical tradition I draw on, but I am aware I am extending Aquinas into territory his account was not developed to address, and a reader who finds that extension unconvincing has not thereby been given reason to reject the more basic argument.

The more basic argument — Barr’s, which I accept — is this: quantum mechanics is incompatible with physical determinism; the measurement problem cannot be resolved without a non-physical knower; the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the most widely discussed materialist alternative, has never made the transition from hypothesis to theorem and contains strong arguments against it, some of which can be pressed without invoking God at all, as philosopher Robert Koons has shown. As long as mind is necessary to resolve the measurement problem, the theistic account is stronger than any hypothesis currently on offer from the atheist materialist side. The Many-Worlds Interpretation has existed since 1958 and remains a hypothesis. Healthy skepticism is warranted whenever a proposal that conveniently eliminates the need for mind has not made this transition, I would argue. We should be aware that scientists are not always well equipped to assess metaphysical and philosophical arguments on their own terms, and their authority does not automatically extend to conclusions in those domains.

A Note on Faith

One final point, which is worth stating plainly. My faith does not rest on the arguments in these articles. I did not become a Christian because I was persuaded by a philosophical case for a divine First Cause in the quantum field, and I would not cease to be a Christian if a version of the Many-Worlds Interpretation were one day vindicated. Accepting any description of the natural order by natural science can never contradict faith in God, as I argued in the first article, for it is beyond the scope of natural science to do so. For example, knowing what is happening at the quantum level is a different question from knowing why it is happening, and these two questions belong to different kinds of inquiry.

What I have been doing in these articles is more modest than a proof. I have been arguing that the findings of natural science, when examined carefully, do not support the confident materialism that is often assumed to follow from them, and that a worldview shaped by Christian faith is more coherent, not less, than one that excludes the non-physical from the outset. A scientist does not need to accept any of Barr’s arguments or mine to be a good scientist. But the scientist who thinks his science requires him to deny that God fills every gap in knowledge — whether through natural means or otherwise — is claiming more than his science has given him. The gap is always there. God is always the answer. The only open question, in any given case, is the means.

All of this is beautifully summed up in one of the hymns of the Byzantine liturgy:

Sunday Orthros, Ode 1, in Tone III

“Our God is he Who cursed the earth to bring as fruit thorns through the sweat of the transgressor, and in the flesh receiveth a crown of thorns from the hands of the transgressors of the law. He hath abolished the curse, in that He hath been glorified.”

If Christ is the new Adam, Our Lady is the new Eve, who leads us to Him and who cooperated with grace fully, giving Christ His humanity. The Byzantine liturgy here portrays her as a lily of purity:

Sunday Orthros, Ode 9, in Tone IV

“We behold thee as lily arrayed in a robe dyed by the divine Spirit, O all-pure one, resplendent amid thorns and filling with sweet fragrance those who sincerely magnify thee. The incorrupt One, receiving corrupt human nature from thy womb, O most immaculate one, showed it to be incorrupt within Himself, in His loving kindness; wherefore we magnify thee as the Theotokos.”

The imagery is evocative of the Song of Songs 2:2: “Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the young women.” (“Thorns” is sometimes translated ‘thistles’.)

The painting above is Convent Thoughts by Charles Alston Collins (English, 1851), in the Pre-Raphaelite style. It hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The museum website tells us:

“A nun looks at a Passion flower, symbolizing the crucifixion of Christ. In her left hand, she holds a religious book open at an image of the Virgin Mary. The frame, designed by Millais, reads: SICUT LILIUM (’As the lily among the thorns’) from the Song of Solomon. This was traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, as was the enclosed garden. The flowers in the painting symbolize various traits of a nun, including remembrance (Forget-me-nots), purity (Madonna lillies), constancy (Evergreen trumpet honeysuckle), and most of all passion for Christ (the Passion flower she holds in her hand).”

Another, rather unusual painting that juxtaposes the lily as Mary with the suffering Christ appears in a 15th-century English wall painting, painted around 1450, at All Saints, Godshill, on the Isle of Wight, which shows Christ on a cross of lilies. The website of the church, now an Anglican parish church, tells us that the lily-cross likely refers to the coincidence that occurs usually several times in any given century, when Good Friday falls on March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation. Ancient tradition holds that the creation of Adam, the Annunciation, and Good Friday all took place on this date, and until 1752, the Feast of the Annunciation, Lady Day, was the beginning of the new year in England.

As I described the various elements of the visual vocabulary of icons in the previous article, a question naturally arises: does what we see in these images correspond to what Christ and the saints actually appear to be in heaven? Or might it be an internally consistent system of visual symbolism that successfully communicates an idea of the eschaton without actually resembling our heavenly destiny? We cannot know that for certain until we arrive there.

However, the strongest argument for a genuine visual correspondence comes from the existence of icons “not made by human hands.” In the East, we have the Mandylion, whose legendary origin involves a cloth that received the image of Christ’s face through direct contact with him during his public ministry. In the West, the Veronica cloth serves as its parallel: a separate tradition holds that Saint Veronica offered her veil to wipe the sweat and blood from Jesus’ face as he carried the cross, miraculously imprinting his features upon it. Both relics are said to be acheiropoieta (images not made by human hands), and although their originals are now lost, numerous later icons and copies based on these prototypes survive. What is striking is how closely each corresponds to the same iconographic type. The name Veronica, incidentally, derives from the Latin vera icon, meaning “true image.”

Among these revealed images is another Western example: the famous Our Lady of Guadalupe. It contains details clearly derived from Aztec culture, others from traditional Christian culture, and some not normally associated with the Spanish Christian culture of the time. What is remarkable is how these disparate elements are combined to form a unified image that has retained its power of appeal across centuries. The image, given to St Juan Diego, a poor Aztec man in 16th-century Mexico, caused millions to convert. It persuaded both the Aztecs and the occupying Spaniards, and continues to draw devotion from Christians around the world.

[Image: Our Lady of Guadalupe.]

The elements related to Aztec culture are as follows. Our Lady’s hairstyle, with the central parting, was the sign of a maiden and a virgin. The ribbon and bow around her waist signified pregnancy. The quatrefoil roses articulated in sepia lines on the pale brown-ochre shawl signified royalty. Aztecs looking at this image would have recognized the meaning of these features immediately.

But the image spoke to the Aztecs about more than their own culture, because it also contained elements drawn from traditional Christian iconography — elements that are universal, speaking to all people of Christ. These were noticed by the 16th-century Spaniards and have connected with Christians from all over the world ever since.

The blue shawl, for example, is a common color for Mary’s outer robe, said to denote royalty; Marian chapels have traditionally had their walls painted blue. The eight-pointed stars represent her connection with the ‘eighth day’ of Creation, her Son, Jesus Christ, who rose on the eighth day of the week. Stars are not the only heavenly bodies represented; the moon appears as well, in accordance with the description of the woman of the Apocalypse, who stands upon an upturned crescent moon.

Another feature of particular interest is the nimbus of light surrounding her whole person. The account of the woman in the Book of Revelation describes her as ‘clothed in the sun,’ and the golden nimbus might correspond to this. But I would suggest that its presence here indicates more specifically Christ’s presence within her womb: it is there not so much for the God-bearer as for God himself, whom she bears. This is the visual means of indicating that Our Lady is with child, the divine child, and it complements the Aztec symbolism of pregnancy, the bow and ribbon. Had this image not also spoken to the Spanish occupiers, no one would have taken St Juan Diego seriously.

Look closely at the gold field that surrounds her. This is not, as one might first suppose, a series of bright gold rays emanating from Our Lady. Rather, it is a series of dark rays on a gold background, the outer limits describing the mandorla shape, a smooth almond. This mandorla darkens as we move toward its center, exactly as the mandorla around Christ in the Transfiguration icon does. It is worth noting that some later copies of this icon get this detail wrong, inverting the shading direction. Here, for comparison, is one painted around 1700:

[Image: Copy of Our Lady of Guadalupe, c. 1700. Note the inversion of the mandorla shading compared with the original.]

All the constituent elements of the image — including aspects not described here, particular to time and place as well as universal in their appeal — are combined to create a composition of remarkable persuasive power. Their presence together creates a paradox: if the artist is not divine, then we have indeed a mortal artist of extraordinary gifts, one simultaneously conversant with Aztec culture, Scripture, and the traditional Christian iconographic tradition that was not then fashionable in 16th-century Spain. Someone with this particular profile would have been very difficult to find in Mexico in 1531.

Considering the style of the image: although it could never be mistaken for a Greek or Russian icon, it is nevertheless broadly in accordance with the iconographic prototype. This makes theological sense, since the iconographic style is the style of eschatological man, and Our Lady is portrayed in glory in heaven; it would be a most appropriate style for her apparition. In accordance with the iconographic tradition, there is no strong cast shadow; the image is defined predominantly by line rather than tone. If this were not a revealed image, our hypothetical artist would be not only a painter and a theologian of considerable insight, in addition to everything else already noted, but one who understood that the iconographic tradition was the most fitting for her representation, and who had sufficient mastery of its principles to apply them with legitimate modifications suited to the Spanish and Aztec context. His familiarity with the iconographic prototype in the case of the mandorla was, it seems, greater than that of at least some of his contemporaries, judging from the errors made in later copies.

If, on the other hand, we accept the tradition that this is an authentic icon not made by human hands, painted in a manner of speaking by the hand of God, then its remarkable degree of conformity to the iconographic tradition is itself evidence of how authentic and true a reflection of reality that tradition is. This, together with the other acheiropoieta, is among the strongest arguments for the authenticity of the iconographic style. The tradition was developed by faithful Christians in the first centuries of the Church, and we have every reason to believe they were divinely guided in that work.

When people today talk of ‘icons’ or ‘holy icons,’ what many have in mind is the style commonly associated with the Eastern Church, especially that of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches. In fact, the iconographic tradition took root across the Christian world, East and West, before Russia existed, and was not limited to the Greek Orthodox Church.

As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Late Antique classical world, a distinct style of art, an adaptation of contemporary Roman art, emerged, and by the early 5th century AD it had become the universal standard for liturgical art across the Christian world. This is the style that became known as icons today and, broadly speaking, is associated today with the Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.

As with so much of Christian culture, the liturgy is the driving force behind the tradition, in that what gives it authenticity as a style is its role as a complement to right worship. Yet, as with Christian culture more broadly, we see variants responsive to particular local cultures and times, all consistent with the broader principles that characterize it and make it authentically liturgical. In the Latin West, sacred art up to about the 12th century — encompassing, for example, the Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Ottonian, Carolingian, and Romanesque styles — was all consistent with the iconographic prototype. Most non-Roman Churches in the Christian East have their own styles, too. Beyond the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions, one thinks, for example, of Coptic iconography from Egypt as a particularly distinctive variant. Not only are these national styles distinguishable from one another, but within each there are typically distinct regional variants as well.

It is important to distinguish between the use of the word ‘icon’ as a generic term for any work of sacred art that is worthy of veneration, as we might use it in considering the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, and its use to denote a particular style of sacred art. In translations of the writings of St John of Damascus and the deliberations of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in the 8th century, and of Theodore the Studite in the 9th century, the word ‘icon’ is best understood as interchangeable with the English word ‘image.’ It is not being used to denote a particular style of sacred art or to elevate any one style above another. Everything the Council documents about, for example, the necessity of having sacred art in our churches and the criteria by which that art is worthy of veneration applies to all liturgical art. The theology the Council articulates is therefore a general theology of images.

In what follows, when I refer to icons, I mean sacred art in the iconographic style. Before considering how to identify that style and distinguish it from the other legitimate forms of liturgical art, the Gothic and the Baroque, I want to address a few misunderstandings and myths about icons so that we are clear about what we are discussing.

The Creative Retrieval of Iconography

The theology of the iconographic style, developed to account for the stylistic elements that characterize the tradition, is a relatively recent development. It may surprise many to learn that, to my knowledge, no such formulation appears in the writings of any Church Father, East or West, until theologians in the 20th century began to develop the theology of icons. This does not necessarily mean there was no shared understanding of the governing principles prior to that; there may well have been. Yet if there was, no record of it has come down to us.

A group of Russian Orthodox expatriates living in France in the mid-20th century developed what is now generally accepted as the theology of the iconographic style. This group included prominent figures such as the theologians Paul Evdokimov, Vladimir Lossky, and Leonid Ouspensky, who was both a painter and a theologian, as well as the icon painter Gregory Kroug. They were responding to what they saw as the steady degeneration of the iconographic tradition in the Eastern Churches over centuries and wished to reestablish it authentically.

Unlike the West, which saw the development of Gothic and then Renaissance traditions from the 11th to the 16th centuries, the art of the Eastern Church did not undergo these transitions. However, the effects of the Enlightenment, which came after the Renaissance, were felt in the East, particularly in Russia, through the efforts of reforming rulers — Peter the Great and Catherine the Great especially — who looked to Western Europe as their model for modernization. Arising from this, there was an increased naturalism in iconography which, unlike the naturalism of Gothic art, was not carried out in accordance with a truly Christian understanding. The result was a style that is neither properly naturalistic nor properly iconographic.

Russian painters of the 19th century noted this degeneration, and arguments were made to abandon the iconographic style altogether in favor of Western naturalism in sacred art. For a while, Orthodox churches were adorned with 19th-century naturalistic styles. While this may have produced fine results in secular painting — the Russian traditions of portraiture and landscape in this period were indeed spectacular — they jarred with many Orthodox Christians, who felt that this naturalistic style of art undermined their worship. By the turn of the 20th century, commentators once again argued for the reestablishment of a purer, more authentic iconographic tradition. This process of creative retrieval, begun in that period, was interrupted by the Bolshevik Revolution, and it was not until the mid-20th century that the expatriates based in Paris who had escaped from Russia, including those already mentioned above, were able to work toward a change.

Their approach was first to establish a canon of imagery they considered the epitome of the style (generally Russian icons from the 15th century). By analyzing the common features within this canon, they developed a theology to explain them, hoping to define a set of principles that would allow both conformity to the tradition and the legitimate organic development of styles within it, as needed by the Church in particular times and places.

It is a tribute to the work of this small group of pioneers that the painting of icons has developed so authentically that many people today wrongly assume that the iconographic tradition of the Eastern Churches has been passed down through an unbroken line since St Luke painted the first icon of the Theotokos. We are now in the third or fourth generation of icon painters who have passed these principles down from teacher to pupil since those 20th-century pioneers, and the best of them are creating work today that is as beautiful and significant as that of the great iconographers of the past.

Because of the success of the pioneering Russians based in Paris, iconographers from other Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches were influenced by their work. Among these were the Greek painter Photis Kontoglou, who contributed to the reestablishment of a flourishing Greek iconographic tradition, and the Egyptian Isaac Fanous, who did the same for the Coptic style.

I have long felt that their approach should serve as the template for Roman Catholic Christians to reestablish their Western traditions of Gothic and Baroque art today. My own analysis of those traditions is based on the work of those 20th-century Russian theologians and is my attempt to begin that process.

The Modern Myths of Iconography

The mystique that so many contemporary Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians associate with iconography has also emerged from this recent period, and bound up with this are several modern myths about icons. These include the ideas that you have to be Orthodox to paint icons well, that you have to be a monk to paint icons, that you must ritually fast and pray before painting an icon, and that the true iconographer does not paint icons but only ‘writes’ them.

Is it true that only Orthodox Christians can paint icons successfully? I would certainly agree that someone who regularly worships with sacred art is more likely to paint it well. This does place Roman Catholics at a disadvantage. Unless a Roman Rite Catholic prays the Divine Office with an image corner at home, he will almost certainly not have the opportunity to do so in the Roman liturgy as it is generally celebrated today, even if there is beautiful art in the church. This therefore greatly favors Orthodox and Eastern Rite Christians, although in principle it does not preclude others from painting icons well; in fact, there are several excellent Catholic iconographers today.

Can only monks paint icons? While a monk’s spiritual life is likely to be compatible with that of an artist who wishes to pursue his vocation, it is not the only form of Christian life that can offer such formation. A devout and sincere layman might flourish as an artist too, and there are many fine icon painters today who are not monks.

On the question of fasting and praying: while there is no accounting for whom God may choose to inspire, or which individual will respond well to that inspiration, the greatest chance of a good response lies with those who lead good and holy lives, and typically this involves regular fasting and prayer. However, this principle is not uniquely applicable to artists; it applies to every aspect of the Christian life and to every Christian. Icon painters should fast and pray regularly, as all Christians should, but this is not a special requirement peculiar to icon painters.

On whether we ‘write’ or paint icons: this question arises from the fact that the Greek and Slavonic words for creating an icon carry no distinction between the two activities, and could legitimately be translated as either writing or painting. One well-known Orthodox iconographer told me that he considered the insistence on the word ‘write’ to be ‘a bit precious.’ As far as he was concerned, if someone uses a paintbrush to apply paint, the English word for that activity is painting, and it does not diminish the standing of the profession to say so. On the contrary, when the icon is beautiful, and we venerate it as we should, that elevates the role of the painter of icons to one of the highest importance, regardless of what we call the process of creating them.

There is also an associated myth that overstates the role of a theology of method, as distinct from the theology that governs the style of the finished image. Some, for example, hold that the image must be created by starting with a dark base and adding layers of lighter color, because God created Light out of darkness. There is no basis for this. A painting is as good as it looks, and if the finished work is good, the method by which it was made is of secondary importance. This is confirmed by modern X-ray analysis of authentic and ancient icons, which shows that painters of the past used a wide variety of methods to produce authentic work.

A Short Summary of the Theology of Iconographic Style

So what is the theology of icons? The iconographic style expresses a desire to present man in full union with God, that is, eschatological man. Consider the Transfiguration icon below, painted in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1516.

The nimbus around Christ darkens toward its center, reflecting a theological point about the nature of divine light. Christ in the Transfiguration is understood as the prototype for all iconographic imagery, and the principle extends further, since all saints shine with the light of Christ because, as baptized Christians, they have ‘put on Christ’. The halo, typically a gold disc around the head, is a stylized representation of the light emanating from the person. In the Transfiguration icon, the prophets and Christ bear halos, while there is a convention that before Pentecost the apostles do not, though they are still portrayed as saints in other respects: there is no cast shadow from any figure, since each is his own source of light, and we see the floating sparkles of uncreated light on their clothes and bodies.

To convey the heavenly dimension, which is outside time and space, the image avoids creating the illusion of depth. The artist paints the image so that it lives, as it were, in the plane of the surface. Rarely does an iconographer use single-point perspective, in which things diminish with distance; he will often use inverted perspective instead, in which things appear wider as they recede.

The size of the beings and creatures portrayed varies according to the hierarchy of being, a feature often referred to as hierarchical perspective. Christ is the largest figure, while trees and mountains are shown smallest relative to their natural size. Even inanimate objects, such as trees and mountains, can be shown bowing toward Christ, indicating that each owes its existence to him and further reinforcing our sense that each has its place in the hierarchy of being. The negative space around the figures is usually a single color, often gold leaf, with minimal indication of the location. The gold or other single-color background reinforces the sense of flatness, and the environment is suffused with light, an effect accentuated by gold leaf that reflects candlelight, causing it to shimmer as though it were a source of light in itself. Some variants, particularly Western variants, have complex patterned backgrounds that achieve the same end — the sense of flat negative space around the figures.

The sense of another world is further heightened by placing the figures in the middle distance. No matter how near we approach the image, there is always some sense of distance between us and the closest figures depicted; they seem to recede as we draw closer. Even with our faces pressed against the surface, they remain some way from us. This creates a dynamic between us and the icon when we pray with them, for it instills in us a longing to be with the saint. This is a longing that finds its fulfillment only in heaven.

All icons aim to portray heavenly realities. Heaven is a realm in which time is compressed into a single moment; past, present, and future are perpetually in a single moment. It is difficult even to imagine this, but it is possible to reflect this mystery. A way to do so is to present a full narrative with different scenes from a story portrayed simultaneously in the image, even though, in real time, they happened sequentially. What took place over an extended period appears in a single image. This might be useful in an icon of the life of a saint, for example. It is common for an important event in the saint’s life to be the largest image, with several miniature scenes of other events from his life around the periphery.

Consider now another image. This icon of the Mother of God with Christ is known as the Vladimir Mother of God. It was painted in Constantinople around 1100 AD, brought to Russia, and became the prototype and model for Russian iconography.

[Image: The Vladimir Mother of God, Constantinople, c. 1100 AD. The prototype for Russian iconography.]

The first thing to notice is how the Theotokos, who bore and gave birth to God, expresses a contentedness tinged with melancholy. This is called ‘bright sadness’ and is intended to convey that the saint lives in eternal bliss but nonetheless feels compassion for those who are not yet with God. The saints want us to join them, and they are happy to intercede for us so that it might happen.

The proportions of the person's features are subtly modified to communicate holy wisdom. The wise man reflects on God’s will before acting. To convey this aspect of wisdom, the receptive organs are relatively large, while the active ones are smaller. Therefore, the eyes are enlarged, and the nose, which inhales the fragrance of heaven, is elongated slightly, and the ears, if they are visible, are slightly larger than they would be naturally. (Typically, we don’t see Our Lady’s ears.) In contrast, the mouth and hands are made smaller. This is not to say that saints are inactive; when they act, their actions are effective. Rather, it speaks of an economy of effort in which nothing is wasted. And similarly, while there is no superfluous word coming from the mouth of a saint, every word that is spoken is golden.

We also see that Christ, though a child in his mother’s arms, appears as a little man. This indicates the paradox that, though human and physically immature, he is still fully God.

Another feature of icons is that the faces of saints are always portrayed in either a full or three-quarter view, so that both eyes are clearly visible. This symbolizes the idea that in heaven we can behold another and know them fully; nothing is hidden, and we are fully known to all others. Only the devil would be shown in full profile. (This is one feature that differentiates early Gothic art from iconographic art. Gothic artists, in order to portray a more naturalistic three-dimensional setting and the sense of a more lifelike interaction between the figures in the composition, gradually begin to place some of those key figures in profile.)

These stylistic devices in icons draw out realities that would otherwise be invisible. The modification of natural appearances, therefore, produces a greater realism than any naturalistic painting or photograph could achieve.

It is common for people who cannot draw well to want to learn to paint icons, assuming that draftsmanship matters less in this tradition, but this is not the case. The artist must not be tempted to use the style to conceal a lack of drawing ability. It takes great skill to reflect visible and otherwise invisible realities in the same painting, so that the two aspects support rather than undermine each other. Our figures must both sparkle with the uncreated light of Christ and read anatomically, just as the drapery must hang and fold as it would naturally around the figure.

Here is another common image of Christ, known as the Mandylion.

[Image: The Mandylion (Christ Acheiropoietos), 12th century, Russia.]

The name comes from the archaic Greek term for ‘cloth’ or ‘towel’ and refers to the tradition that the prototype of this icon was a cloth pressed against the face of Our Lord, and that the image was miraculously transferred to it. It is perhaps the most famous of the icons called acheiropoietos, meaning ‘not made with human hands,’ images that are revealed rather than painted. Notice how stern Christ appears. This sternness is sometimes employed in the depiction of Christ to indicate that he is a judge. It must never be excessive, because we also wish to convey that he is a just judge and that divine justice is always tempered with great mercy.

In common with all authentically liturgical art, there is a general disposition against innovation and originality for their own sake. New icons are created only as needed by the Church, for example to portray a newly canonized saint. The icon painter always reproduces the prototype with an understanding of the ideal it is intended to express and always aims to portray the ideal as best he can rather than a simple copy of another work of art. Accordingly, the goal is to create something greater than that which he copies.

These revealed images — the ones said to be “not made with human hands” — raise a question that goes to the heart of the whole tradition: does what we see in an icon actually correspond to what Christ and the saints are like in heaven, or is it simply an internally consistent system of symbols? That question, and the most remarkable of these revealed images, Our Lady of Guadalupe, are the subject of the second of these two articles.

What governs the style of these traditions?

The most important factor governing the style of figurative art is its understanding of the human person — what theologians call anthropology. Those familiar with John Paul II’s Theology of the Body will know that he distinguishes different states of human existence; it is helpful to draw on his categories here.

First, there is Original Man: Adam and Eve before the Fall, ‘naked without shame’, marked by innocence and complete reliance on God.

Second, there is Historical Man: mankind after the Fall, bearing the consequences of a broken relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Though corrupted by sin, Historical Man is not utterly depraved; he retains the capacity for sanctity through cooperation with grace. This is the condition we all share in this life.

Third, there is Eschatological Man: man as he will be in heaven — immortal, partaking of the divine nature, adopted as a son or daughter of God, and united to Christ in a perfect exchange of love.

These second two of these states, as I see it, correspond broadly to the three liturgical traditions in different ways. (There is no tradition directly relating to Original Man, to my knowledge).

The iconographic tradition reveals Eschatological Man. One important inspiration for this style is the account of the glorified Christ in the Transfiguration; all the saints share in that glory through baptism, as members of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. The stylistic features of icons are shaped by the desire to communicate the reality of man in heaven. The gold disc — the halo — represents the uncreated light radiating from the glorified body. There are no cast shadows, since each figure is its own light source rather than being illuminated from outside. And because heaven lies outside space and time, the icon deliberately reduces the illusion of depth through devices such as reverse perspective, ensuring that the figures inhabit the plane of the painting as much as possible. This is also why oil paint is generally avoided in iconography: it creates too strong an illusion of depth and a quality of sensory richness that works against the image’s purpose. Egg tempera, mosaic, and fresco are better suited to the iconographic style.

The Baroque tradition reveals Historical Man, and its distinctive style follows from that different subject. Where iconographic art flattens space and eliminates shadow, Baroque painting deliberately creates an illusion of depth through perspective and portrays deep cast shadows from external light sources. Shadow has been a symbol of evil and suffering throughout Christian tradition — the ancient Office of Tenebrae (named for the Latin word for darkness or shadows) uses precisely this symbolism within the Triduum, in the final days of Holy Week. In Baroque painting, those shadowy depths are deliberately exaggerated, but the Christian message is not one of despair. Just as Easter follows Good Friday, the darkness in a Baroque painting is always contrasted with light, representing the Light that is Christ, that overcomes darkness.

The Baroque style is far more naturalistic than the iconographic, but it is not a simple reproduction of appearances. The artist varies color, edge sharpness, and tonal contrast to direct the viewer’s eye toward what matters and to ensure that the figure is depicted with dignity worthy of a creature made in God’s image. While Baroque art is always the art of fallen, Historical Man, it insists on man’s capacity for sanctity and his need for God’s grace. It is the art of suffering and hope, a Christian hope that transcends suffering.

[Image: St Jerome and the Angel of Judgement, by Jose Ribera, Spanish/Italian, 1626, in the Baroque style]

Baroque art should be clearly distinguished from the academic painting of the 19th century, with figures such as Ingres or Bouguereau in France, and from the Pre-Raphaelites in England in the same period. While there were some good examples within each grouping, in my opinion, we can detect that, as a whole, there is a subtle drift away from the Christian balance of idealization and naturalism toward one extreme or the other, becoming either cold and sterile or sentimental to the point of being saccharine. Much of what became 20th-century modernism was an overreaction to this 19th-century academic art. Although the modernists believed they were reacting against Christian tradition, they were, aesthetically at least, reacting against an inferior distortion of it.

The Gothic tradition occupies the ground between the other two, which is fitting given its historical position as a transitional form derived from the Romanesque and anticipating the Baroque. In stylistic terms, it oscillates between the visual language of Eschatological Man, characterized by a highly abstracted iconographic style, and that of Historical Man, characterized by a highly naturalistic Baroque style. It might be called the art of pilgrimage: its imagery points simultaneously toward heaven and the fallen world, reflecting that although we cannot complete the transformation into Eschatological Man in this life, we can begin it. The sacramental life of the Church is precisely the means by which that transformation starts. Like the spires of Gothic churches, Gothic art reaches upward to the heavens while remaining rooted in the earth.

The late-Gothic painter Fra Angelico illustrates the point well. He uses elements of the increasing naturalism developing around him, such as single-point perspective and cast shadows, alongside the iconographic visual vocabulary of uncreated light and pictorial flatness. His depictions of the Annunciation (there are several) are examples of paintings that employ perspective and cast shadow; his heavenly scenes, such as the Coronation of the Virgin, revert to the iconographic prototype of flattened space and radiant light. His works are not inconsistent with each other: they reflect a coherent theological understanding of the difference between scenes set in this world and those set in the next.

[Image: The Coronation of the Virgin by Fra Angelico, painted around 1434.]

A reasonable question arises here. If each tradition rests on a different understanding of man — fallen, glorified, or on pilgrimage between the two — how is it that within a single tradition we find figures in all three states? Baroque art reveals Historical Man, yet it gives us scenes set in heaven, such as the Coronation of the Virgin. The answer, I would argue, is that while a tradition may occasionally admit some slight variation — Fra Angelico is a rare and notable case — in general, once a style of representing the human figure is established within a tradition, it is applied across all situations. To ask an artist to be fluent in several styles and traditions at once, switching between them according to the subject, would be asking too much of him and would likely confuse those who see it; working consistently within one style is what gives a body of work its coherence. And in any case, there are other means of indicating heaven while remaining within the Baroque idiom — the presence of angels, the absence of any earthly setting, and so on.

Why not the High Renaissance?

Many Catholics will be surprised to find that Benedict XVI’s list of authentic liturgical artistic traditions does not include the High Renaissance — the period of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, c. 1480–1530, which is often considered the summit of Catholic artistic achievement. I follow Pope Benedict’s lead here, and it is worth explaining why.

All traditional art training involves, in varying degrees, copying the works of great masters and the direct observation of nature. The style in which an artist ultimately paints is shaped above all by the art with which he is most familiar, which in turn shapes his response to the nature he observes. Gothic artists looked to Romanesque models and to one another; for this reason, there was no sharp break between the Romanesque and the Gothic, and Gothic art can be understood as a progressively “naturalized” version of the iconographic style, the level of naturalism increasing gradually and without any clear dislocation from its roots.

The High Renaissance represents a different kind of transition: a clear break from that inherited tradition. Artists of this period no longer looked primarily to Romanesque or Gothic masters for inspiration, but to the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that surrounded them in Italy and were being excavated at the time. The sharp change in style between the Gothic and the Italian High Renaissance is not a reflection of increased naturalism — as we have explained, that process had already been going on for centuries. Rather, it is due to the incorporation into artists' training of copying ancient Greek and Roman statues and plaster casts of them, which radically altered the form of the art. The main impetus for this was not theological or philosophical; rather, it was simply that the period was enamored of the magnificence of this ancient form and wished to emulate it.

The implications of this shift were far-reaching. Benedict XVI described what followed:

The Renaissance did something quite new...its art speaks of the grandeur of man almost as if it were surprised by it; it needs no other beauty to seek...The tragic burden of antiquity is forgotten; only its divine beauty is seen. A nostalgia for the gods emerges, for myth, for a world without the fear of sin...True, Christian subjects are still being depicted, but ‘religious art’ is no longer sacred in the proper sense. It does not enter into the humility of the other sacraments and their time-transcending dynamism.

The Spirit of the Liturgy, p129

The phrase “without fear of sin” is worth dwelling on. It was the art theorist Alberti who first proposed, in his influential treatise On Painting (1435), that the observation of the nude should also form part of every artist’s training, along with the copying of ancient statues. In doing so, he was knowingly departing from the practice of Christian tradition up to that point — attaching excessive importance to direct observation of the unclothed figure without sufficient regard, in my opinion, for human dignity or for concupiscence, the natural inclination of fallen man toward sin.

The 16th century, shaped by Alberti’s ideas, is characterized less by a coherent tradition than by a series of dominant, individualistic, and brilliantly gifted figures: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. While there were undoubted individual high points, the period as a whole represented a departure from the sacred character of what preceded it, for the reasons Benedict identifies. The Baroque style was a deliberate response to this, inspired by the Council of Trent (which closed in 1563) and the spiritual energy of the Counter-Reformation. Gradually, the contributions of these and other artists were assessed and integrated, and by the end of the 16th century a coherent Christian tradition, properly grounded in theology, had developed from their work.

This, then, is why the High Renaissance, for all its brilliance, does not appear among the three authentic traditions. It is not a judgment on the gifts of its artists, but a recognition that the sacred character of an artistic tradition depends on the end it serves and the understanding of the human person it embodies. The iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque each, in their different ways, keep that end in view; and it is to a fuller account of each that I hope to turn in the articles that follow.

The Essence Of The Way Of Beauty Groups

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Way of Beauty Fellowship Groups

The process can be followed individually or with personal mentorship. The establishment of a weekly Way of Beauty group at a school or elsewhere, under the guidance of a leader, helps create a community of people with different levels of experience. Typically, a group of 8 to 15 works best. The format of the meeting might be as follows:

• Opening prayer. Pray the psalms together; a psalm or two for the day can be selected.

• Introductions. Ask if there are new people who wish to introduce themselves and to explain what brought them. Welcome them, and encourage them to stay afterward to get to know the others. We suggest that new people with no experience simply listen the first time.

• Those with experience speak. Go around the room. Each person introduces themselves by name, shares how well they have been following the process during the week, and then speaks about a chosen topic for the week, for example, ‘my experience of weekly service.’ The atmosphere is encouraging and positive; the aim is not to call people out for falling short, but the sharing does help to make people accountable to one another.

• Announcements. If appropriate: for example, that the group meets next week at the same time, or goes for coffee afterward.

• Closing prayer. Of the group’s choosing. The Lord’s Prayer is a good choice.

The purpose of the group is as follows:

• A forum for giving witness to the benefits, so as to encourage others.

• A forum for the inexperienced to mix with the experienced, and perhaps to find a mentor.

• A forum for mutual encouragement, so that people stick to the habits of faith and creativity.

• A forum for community and friendship. A group that prays together as peers and offers encouragement can become a source of community.

• A forum for service. Volunteering to contribute to the running of the meeting, putting out the chairs, leading the meeting, opening up the room, can itself be the weekly commitment of service.

The Essential Elements Of The Way Of Beauty Process

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A Process of Personal Development in Faith and Creativity

The Way of Beauty is a program of personal development that cultivates the capacity to apprehend beauty and fosters personal creativity. It contains the essential features of the formation that would have been given to great artists in the Western tradition. The activities are consistent with faith in God and with the understanding that God is the source of our inspiration, so that, in our creative work, we look beyond ourselves. This is not so much ‘self-expression’ as inspired creativity, arising from a Christian understanding of the human person.

The Scala Foundation (www.scalafoundation.org) has experience in practicing and implementing all of these elements and can help you directly, but we invite you, if you wish, to follow your own vision for implementing these principles.

Do I need to be Christian?

A Christian will be very comfortable with this program, but a Christian faith is not necessary in order to benefit from it. All that is required is an openness to the possibility that there is a God, and a willingness to act as though He exists and wants us to be creative and inspired. The activities are habits of faith and creativity that can remain with someone for a lifetime.

The Process

The elements of the process are as follows:

Habits of faith. Pray first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and learn meditation in the Western tradition, for example, ‘counting your blessings’ by writing a gratitude list. This can take as little as three minutes a day in total.

Praying the psalms. The psalms are spiritually and psychologically nourishing, and are the way to ‘pray the Bible’ par excellence, as a complement to Sunday worship. They are full of vivid imagery that stimulates the spiritual imagination, and they have formed and informed Western culture for centuries, especially when chanted.

A habit of service. A regular, perhaps weekly, commitment to voluntary service. Volunteer to serve your community in any way, in order to develop the habit of self-sacrifice.

A habit of creativity. A regular, perhaps weekly, commitment to an activity in which beauty is the end, and in which we create it with care and with a skill that we learn. This is not just for the artistically gifted; anything that brings some pleasure in the doing will serve: gardening, art classes, music, embroidery. This habit stimulates the faculty of co-creating with God, an inspired creativity, which can then inform the talents a person does have, in any human activity.

The study of beauty. Developing an appreciation for the beauty of nature and of the great works of mankind: art, music, literature, architecture. Go out into the natural world and study it; study a canon of great works by the creative masters of the past. The deepest formation is to associate beauty with our prayer and worship, chanting the psalms beautifully and using traditional sacred images as a focus for our prayer.

Discernment of personal vocation. As appropriate to the age of the individual and their disposition in faith, undertake spiritual exercises to discern what God is calling them to do, their personal vocation. A person’s creativity will flourish most in the context of their personal calling, whatever that may be, and for most people this is not artistic.

Review of conscience and confession of sins. A regular review of conscience, followed by confession of sins. Ideally, this is done in a sacramental setting, but for those who are not a member of a Church where this is available, confession to a trusted layperson is recommended as an alternative. As the Letter of St James says, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed” (James 5:16). If we harm others, we should be ready to make amends to those whom we have harmed.

Sunday worship. For those who are Christian, we encourage them to view these activities as a complement to Sunday worship.

What should the content of sacred art be?

Every time an artist paints, he asks three fundamental questions: What do I paint? How do I paint it? And why am I painting it? All three are interconnected, but his answer to the first question — ‘What?’ — governs the content; and his answer to the second — ‘How?’ — governs the style. The third question, ‘Why?’, establishes the purpose that both content and style must serve.

The content and style of sacred art must accordingly serve its sacred purpose. By tradition, that purpose is to show us what we could not otherwise see, in such a way that it deepens our participation in worship and prayer. An image of Christ on the Cross is vital to our worship, for example, because it tells us something about what is happening at the Mass. Paintings of saints and angels reveal to us that there is a heavenly host who worship God alongside us. Paintings of the feasts and Gospel narratives connect these events to specific points in the liturgical year.

In this sense, sacred art makes the invisible visible. It does so in two ways. First, as one might expect, through its subject matter. Second, through the style in which it is painted. So, in the case of sacred art, how the subject is painted is just as important in communicating theological truths as what is painted. This second point is less immediately obvious and warrants careful explanation.

[Image: The Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God and the Christ Child by Gregory Kroug, Russian, 20th century, in the iconographic style. Egg tempera on panel. Three stars on her outer garment, on each shoulder (one is hidden) and her forehead are symbols of perpetual virginity, i.e. before, during and after the birth of the Savior.]

What governs style in art?

Most people coming out of fine art departments in the West today would assume that style is a purely personal choice, needing no stronger justification than the artist’s own preference. The Christian artist, however, should approach things differently. Every artist makes personal choices, but a Christian artist makes those choices in light of an end that aligns with his faith, and, as a result, Christian art should be as recognizably Christian by virtue of its style alone as the Christian life.

If an artist wants to paint Our Lady, he will not only represent her visible appearance as faithfully as he can; drawing on tradition, he will also seek to communicate truths about her that would not be visible even if she were standing before us — that she is a saint in heaven, that she is the Mother of God, that she is a virgin in perpetuity, and that, in common with all humanity, she is a person with an invisible soul as well as a visible body. These truths are abstracted — literally ‘drawn out’ — and made visible through a controlled and partial modification of natural appearances, which creates a characteristic style. It takes great skill to do this, but when done well, the resulting stylization conveys a deeper reality than a strictly naturalistic representation could and communicates many of these aspects to people who intuit these truths, even though they are often unaware of precisely how the artist uses style to communicate them.

To describe this in more detail, it is worth establishing the meanings of the terms I will use here. When I want to describe conformity to natural appearances, I use the word ‘naturalism’. Some other commentators will use the word ‘realism’ here, but I generally prefer not to, since it implies that natural appearances constitute the whole of reality, which is not true.

The tendency to deviate from natural appearances, on the other hand, is called by other commentators and me variously and interchangeably ‘abstraction’, ‘symbolism’, or ‘idealism’.

Both tendencies — that is, heightened naturalism or heightened abstraction (symbolism or idealism) — taken to their extremes, mask reality rather than reveal it. Too much abstraction risks an ugly distortion that hides the truth. The artist risks distorting appearances to the point that the viewer cannot recognize what he is supposed to be looking at. Alternatively, the artist can misapply distortion to convey the wrong message — for example, an overly erotic representation of the female figure, as seen in advertising and superhero comics. This quality of heightened eroticism is communicated as much by the style of the painting as by the pose that the figure adopts.

Too much naturalism, as we see in the style known as ‘photorealism’ (which I consider a misnomer for the reason stated above), often produces a cold sterility that fails to convey the full Christian understanding of what it means to be a person, including the presence of an immortal soul.

Christian figurative art has always navigated a course between these two poles. Because doing so is genuinely difficult, the Christian artist is wise to conform to traditional, tried-and-tested styles and to depart from established stylistic conventions only when the needs of a particular community or time clearly require it. This principle is sometimes called the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’, and can be summarized simply: don’t change things unless you have to.

Pope Pius XII addressed this balance directly in his 1947 encyclical, Mediator Dei. (In the passage below, Pius is using the word ‘realism’ to refer to what I would call naturalism, and ‘symbolism’ to refer to the degree of abstraction or idealization):

Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, should not be universally despised and rejected through prejudice. Modern art should be given free scope in the due and reverent service of the church and the sacred rites, provided that they preserve a correct balance between styles tending neither to extreme realism nor to excessive ‘symbolism,’ and that the needs of the Christian community are taken into consideration rather than the particular taste or talent of the individual artist. (Mediator Dei, 195)

Most of the recognizable artistic styles that have developed since the beginning of the 20th century depart radically, in my opinion, from the traditional balance of naturalism and idealism — but that should not surprise us, since most modern artists had no intention of conforming to Christian tradition, actually quite the reverse; and they have a different understanding of the human person and the world around us. To consider two examples: photorealist painting, at one extreme, reflects a denial of anything beyond surface appearances. By reproducing the visible world with photographic precision and deliberate emotional flatness, it presents the human figure as a mere object among objects, stripped of any evident interior life or soul and seen as having no greater value than a cigarette butt on the sidewalk. Abstract Expressionism, at the other extreme, largely abandons the material world and the body as meaningful subjects. It instead seeks to convey pure inner states — emotions and feelings — through gesture, color, and non-representational form. For many of these artists, the essence of humanity lies in thoughts, feelings, and subjective experience rather than in the embodied person. Abstract Expressionist art, such as that of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, although it seeks to communicate essential aspects of human nature as they see it, does not convey any sense of the human body. There is no figure shown that we would recognize as having two arms, two legs, and so on. Each approach runs contrary to the Christian understanding of the human person as a unity of body and soul.

The three authentic traditions of liturgical art

In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy (p. 129), Pope Benedict XVI identifies three authentic traditions of liturgical art. Each in its own characteristic way strikes the balance between naturalism and abstraction that Pius XII called for. Here is an introduction to them and to what unites or distinguishes them from one another.

The first is the iconographic tradition. This style developed in the early centuries of the Church, reaching a distinctive form around the 4th century AD. It remained the dominant form of Christian sacred art, albeit in many different variations, until the 12th century, and continues to characterize the sacred art of Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox churches to this day. When we speak of ‘icons’, the images of Russian and Greek Orthodox churches naturally come to mind first — for example, the holy icons from the Monastery of St Catherine on Mt Sinai dating to the 6th century, or the works of Andrei Rublev and Theophanes the Greek in the 14th and 15th centuries. However, it is less well known that the iconographic style is also part of the Western, Roman tradition. In the West, after the style’s first development in the 4th century, all artistic styles up to and including the Romanesque remained fully consistent with the same iconographic prototype. The figurative art of the Book of Kells, made in Ireland in the 8th century, and the Celtic style, for instance, conform to the iconographic prototype. Though they may look very different from a Russian icon, they share the same underlying principles that define iconographic art.

[Image: An 8th-century illumination of St Mark in the Celtic style from the Gospel of St Gallen. It looks very different from a Russian icon, yet the two share the underlying principles of the iconographic tradition.]

The second authentic tradition is the Gothic. This term is generally applied to a style that emerged in the Western Church around the 12th century, replacing the earlier Romanesque style, and died out by the 16th century. Duccio, the 13th-century Italian painter, is a representative example: his work is characterized by greater naturalism than the iconographic tradition, though it remains highly abstract in comparison with later Western styles. Over time, the degree of naturalization steadily increased, while maintaining the essential formal elements of this newly established Gothic style. I would include artists such as Fra Angelico and Flemish painters such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden in this category, considering them late-Gothic.

[Image: Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden, 1460]

One explanation for this transition from the iconographic Romanesque style is the influence of the ideas of Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher of the 4th century BC, whose works were rediscovered and incorporated into Christian thought by the medieval scholastics beginning around the 12th century and gathering pace thereafter — among them St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century AD. Through this renewed study of Aristotle, integrated into Christian thought by these great medieval figures, there was now greater confidence in the senses’ capacity to yield reliable knowledge and a deepened appreciation of the created world, which could be accurately observed and understood through the information they provide. It was not a wholesale reversal of earlier assumptions — Christians had always trusted the senses to some degree and believed in the reality of the world around us — but rather a significant shift of emphasis. As a result of this greater stress on the intelligibility of the natural world, there was a greater curiosity about it and a desire to understand the order that pervades it. An outcome of this is an increased naturalism in art. Artists studied and copied nature more rigorously than before. Many today associate high naturalism in Christian art with the Italian High Renaissance, with artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo, but the development of naturalistic art did not begin with them. Rather, it is the culmination of a process of systematic observation of nature that began much earlier, in the Gothic period. A second outcome of this movement toward a more intensive and systematic study of nature and the natural order, incidentally, was the emergence of what would eventually become modern natural science and the scientific method.

The third tradition considered authentically liturgical and sacred is the Baroque — or, as Benedict XVI puts it, the Baroque ‘at its best’. This is the strongly naturalistic style that developed in Italy as part of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and characterizes the art of 17th-century Western Europe. The artists who established it include Federico Barocci and Caravaggio; other well-known Baroque painters include Velázquez, Georges de La Tour, Zurbarán, Van Dyck, Rubens, Guido Reni, and Ribera. Though strongly naturalistic, the style employs a carefully worked-out, if subtly applied, abstraction. Later commentators, drawing on Platonic terminology, would call this partial abstraction ‘idealization’ in connection with Baroque art.

[Image: St James the Greater, by the Italian artist Guido Reni — an example of 17th-century Baroque sacred art.]

These, then, are the three traditions: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. We have seen what unites them — each strikes, in its own way, the balance between naturalism and abstraction proper to sacred art. What we have not yet seen is what accounts for the differences between them, and why these three, and not others, are the traditions Benedict identifies. In the next of these two articles, I will turn to that question, drawing on the anthropology of John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, and will explain why the High Renaissance, so often regarded as the summit of Catholic art, does not belong on the list.

I was recently made aware of this remarkable collection of English medieval illuminations through Hilary White’s Sacred Images Project Substack, and I was immediately struck by the quality of the draughtsmanship. Looking at these images, it became clear to me that these are among the finest models I have encountered for artists who wish to learn to draw and paint in a style appropriate for the renewal of sacred art in our own time.

The Sarum Use and Its Living Descendants

Before turning to the images themselves, it is worth pausing to consider what this Psalter actually is - it is significant in a way that resonates today.

The Sarum Use was a distinctly English form of the Roman Rite, developed at Salisbury and prevalent across much of England throughout the medieval period, right up to the Reformation. This particular Psalter belongs to that tradition.

This gives these illuminations a particular resonance with Christians in the Anglo-American world. The Psalter from the Book of Common Prayer, called the Coverdale Psalter - after Miles Coverdale, who translated the text into English in the 16th century - is a liturgical descendant of the Sarum Use of the Roman Rite. It is the Psalter that generations of Anglicans have prayed, and which continues to be prayed today. It is approved for use by Catholics (in the 1928 revision used by the Anglican Ordinariates), Orthodox, and many Protestant denominations. All share a living connection to the liturgical world that produced the images shown here. To look at this Psalter is, for many of these Christians, to encounter a visual companion of their contemporary daily worship.

The School of St Albans — Broadly Understood

I have referred in the past to the tradition these images represent as the School of St Albans, though I use that phrase in a more generic sense than art historians might. Strictly speaking, the School of St Albans refers to the English illumination of the early Gothic and late Romanesque period — particularly the work of the 13th-century monk Matthew Paris, who worked at St Albans Abbey. His style can be seen in manuscripts such as the Westminster Psalter and in the wall paintings that still survive in English churches.

This Psalter was likely not produced at St Albans — it comes from elsewhere in England. The Cambridge Digital Library, which provided the images, suggests that it is likely elsewhere in southeast England, either Lincoln or East Anglia. But it still contains the essential elements of the style as I have described it: the primacy of line in describing form, a limited palette, and an emphasis on flat coloration rather than blended tonal modeling. Whether we call it the School of St Albans or simply the English medieval tradition, this manuscript is a full expression of it!

These limitations in stylistic features, which distinguish it from naturalistic forms of art, are its strength. As a result, the style sidesteps what I consider the blight of so much modern sacred art: sentimentality. When you cannot render every gradation of light and shadow, you are forced to think clearly about form, about meaning, and about what is essential. Line demands clarity, while tonal naturalism invites sentiment. The School of St Albans offers artists today a discipline that might hold sentimentality at bay!

What to Notice in These Images

As you look at these beautiful reproductions from the Psalter, there a couple of points I would make:.

Consistent with the broader Western tradition of sacred art, there is a heavy emphasis on beautiful, ornate patterns in the borders, backgrounds, and across the surface of the image. This richly ornamented flatness is distinct from what we encounter in much contemporary Byzantine iconography, for example, which tends toward greater austerity in those areas that could be decorated.

At the same time - and here is an example of how the English tradition converges with the Byzantine - the content follows traditional customs. Notice, for example, how the Nativity is depicted. St Joseph is portrayed as significantly older than Our Lady: by tradition, he was a widower, and is depicted in imagery as set apart from the Virgin and Child in the Nativity. This deliberate distancing signals his temporary doubt about the Virgin Birth. Contemporary depictions of St Joseph in the Roman church, on the other hand, tend to portray him as a young and vigorous man.

There are twelve folios of this type, which can be seen at the Cambridge University Digital Library site. In addition there are twelve calendar pages that list the feasts of each month along with border decoration.

And decorated letter pages for each of the eight Hours, as well as for the Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The following one is for Matins. You can see the letter ‘D’ which begins the opening lines, Deus in adiutorium mean intende. Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina.

How Artists Can Learn This Today

It struck me that these images can be a resource for any artist serious about working in this tradition and making it their own today. The goal is not a simple imitation, but to reestablish a living tradition that develops organically over time so that it simultaneously participates in the tradition, while always being fresh and new, and speaks to contemporary people.

The practical path forward for those who are interested, I suggest, begins with the Writing the Light program, which I have written about before: the wall-painting and icon-drawing courses offered by the master iconographer George Kordis. This is a two-year, part-time hybrid program that combines online instruction with in-person workshops — see my recent post for more details. The program is rooted in the Greek tradition of iconography, which provides the foundational skills of the craft: the discipline of line, the understanding of light, and the visual grammar of sacred art.

Students who want to make the School of St Albans specifically their own should supplement this formation with systematic personal study of past works — particularly artists such as Matthew Paris himself, and now, I am suggesting, these images from the Use of Sarum Book of Hours. The principle at work here is an ancient one in artistic formation: imitate a style until it becomes your natural expression.

This is exactly how the great artists of the High Renaissance made the ancient world their own. Michelangelo and Raphael did not simply admire Greek and Roman statuary — they copied it, systematically and persistently, alongside drawing and painting from life. Through that double discipline of copying the masters and studying nature, the classical ideal became their natural artistic language.

The same path is open to artists who wish to make the Gothic style their own. Learn the craft’s skills through a rigorous program like Writing the Light. Study works from life. And alongside both of these, copy and contemplate works by the masters of the English medieval tradition. It will require students of ability and drive in the first instance — but it is most certainly possible. This is how traditions are retrieved.

You can read more at WritingtheLight.com.

A Word to Patrons

There is another challenge here, and I address it directly to those with means and a heart for sacred art renewal: consider sponsoring a talented artist from your own parish or community to undertake Writing the Light’s formation. The retrieval of this tradition will not happen through institutions alone. It will happen one artist at a time, formed with patience and supported by people who understand what is at stake. You could be part of that!

All images are from the University of Cambridge Digital Library, made available for download and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

I want to take up that thread here and follow it further, because I think the connection is not just a historical coincidence but a matter of theological necessity. Images and Mary are bound together in the roles they play in the Christian faith and in Christian culture, and understanding why is to understand something important about how Christian culture is built and how it decays.

The argument is an old one, and it was worked out over the first eight centuries of the Church. Cardinal Schönborn, in his book God’s Human Face, describes the trail of logic that led to the conclusions of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the council that concerned itself with sacred art and the veneration of holy icons. What he shows is that the conclusions of the first six councils were necessary to the deliberations of the seventh. The defense of the image was not an afterthought. It was the culmination of everything the Church had so far learned to say about God and man.

The chain runs like this. The Church had first to establish the doctrine of the Trinity, three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to articulate what a person is. Then it had to articulate an adequate Christology for the second person of the Trinity, the Son, one person in two natures, fully God and fully man. Then it had to articulate an adequate Mariology, establishing that Christ received his human nature from Mary, and that Mary was therefore the mother who bore the person of Christ, and so was the Mother of God and worthy of the title Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Only then could the council reach its conclusion about images. If Christ is the image of the invisible God, the Father, as St Paul says, then during his historical presence on earth man was able to see the person of Christ as man, and in seeing him to see the image of the Father, and so to worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit. This is what Christ himself meant: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” By extension and by analogy, we can worship Christ through images of him when we venerate an icon of Christ.

Worship is due to God alone. But we venerate Mary and the saints, as distinct from worshiping them, when we venerate images of them, kissing them, praying before them, and so on. The veneration passes to the one represented; it does not stop at the wood and paint.

Notice what this means. The defense of the icon depends on the doctrine that Christ is fully man, which depends in turn on the doctrine that he received a real human nature from a real human mother. Take away Mary and the whole structure becomes unstable. If Christ’s humanity is obscured, the ground for the image is cut away, and if the image goes, so in time does the vivid sense of Christ’s humanity that the image served to keep before our eyes. The icon and the Mother hold each other up.

How we apprehend the beauty of the cosmos

There is a further step that carries us from theology into the experience of beauty. The cosmos bears the pattern of Christ, the Creator, for through him all things were made, as St John tells us:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1:1–3, cf. Colossians 1:16)

This was affirmed by the Church in its formulation of the Nicene Creed as well.

The cosmos is beautiful to us when we behold it because it bears that pattern in its underlying order, an order we perceive and delight in when we appreciate its beauty. This is true even for those who do not yet love Christ, for the pattern of Christ is imprinted on every human heart at conception and purified through baptism and the sacramental life. We instinctively connect the pattern of the cosmos with the one imprinted on our hearts each time we apprehend the beauty of the cosmos.

But the fullest appreciation of the beauty of the cosmos does not come from appreciating it as it now is. Beautiful though it is, fallen nature is not yet fully what it ought to be. We grasp the beauty it would have in its perfection, and will have on the last day, only to the degree that we grasp the beauty of Christ himself. Though that pattern is imprinted on our hearts at conception, it can be distorted by our sin, which also clouds our inward gaze.

To purify our recognition of the perfection toward which beauty points, we need to purify our hearts through participation in the life of faith and the sacramental life, and crucial to this grasping of the beauty of Christ is the veneration of his icons. This is not to claim that the holy icon bears a perfect representation of Christ. Rather, the icon is fashioned by a tradition designed to work in harmony with prayer and worship, so that through it we have a deeper and richer encounter with Christ in heaven and with Christ present in the Blessed Sacrament.

That encounter imparts to our hearts a deeper grasp of who Christ is and a greater love for him, so that we begin to intuit the idealized pattern of the cosmos even when we look upon its fallen version. And this greater appreciation of the beauty of the cosmos leads us in turn into a yet greater grasp of the beauty of Christ, for we see more clearly how the beauty of the world speaks of the One who made it. It is an upward spiral, a positive feedback loop in which the apprehension of beauty and the love of Christ feed one another.

Because holy images, and through them the fullest possible grasp that Christ is truly man, are necessary to this dynamic, it follows that if we do not venerate holy images of Christ and worship him and the Father through them, with the help of the Spirit, our love for Christ and our appreciation of the beauty around us will tend to decline. This is in part why, one may speculate, the Seventh Ecumenical Council went so far as to argue that the veneration of images is a necessary component of the expression of our faith, not an optional devotional extra.

And given that Mary’s role in the Incarnation is essential, for it was she who gave Christ his human nature, neglect of Mary will, in time, lead to neglect of her Son as well, and to a diminished capacity to see Christ in the world and in the people around us.

This, I think, is what Harrington either alluded to or glimpsed without fully spelling out. The Reformation’s suspicion of images and its de-centering of Mary were not two unrelated reforms. The Reformation’s suspicion of images and its de-centering of Mary were not two unrelated reforms. They were two parts of the same change, and they stand or fall together.

What, then, has all this to do with culture?

As I have written about extensively in my books such as The Way of Beauty, man’s capacity to create a beautiful culture that is Christian, and for those of us in the West that Christian culture is the same as traditional Western culture, rests in his being able to co-create with God, to form matter, under God’s inspiration, into a beauty that speaks of the idealized cosmos, which is to say the beauty of Christ in heaven. To the degree that he succeeds, his work surpasses the beauty of fallen nature. This requires grace and the disposition to respond to grace, the instinct to manifest the pattern of Christ in our work. That pattern was imprinted on our hearts at conception, and the instinct to manifest it grows with our love for the One who placed it there, for as that love grows we see him more clearly in ourselves, in others, and in the cosmos, and we begin to see how each creature ought to be in its perfection.

That creative capacity is therefore stimulated by love of Christ and love of his Mother, in whom love of the Son is bound up, for she directs us to his human nature, which then opens the door to loving the whole person, God and man. And that love is itself stimulated through a life of prayer to Mary and to Christ, and through the veneration of icons of each. The formation that does this work is not principally a formation of the intellect, by which we understand the principles I have been laying out, useful though that understanding may be. It is primarily a formation of the heart, a formation in love. It is through devotion to Mary and worship of Christ that we grow in love, and it is from that love that beautiful Christian work proceeds.

Why focus on Mary and on images?

A word on why I single out these two things. Mariology is necessary to the faith but not sufficient on its own. As I am a convert to the Catholic faith, I can see why we need every link in the chain: trinitarian theology, Christology, the understanding of the human person, Mariology, the theology of images, and the other necessary aspects of Catholic dogma.

It strikes me that it is important to focus on Mary and the image because they are the two aspects often neglected by many Protestants. The veneration of images might remain an obstacle for ecumenism, but Mariology need not be so great a barrier as it might first appear, because it is part of the Protestant inheritance too, as I argued in the previous essay; the Reformers retained the core Marian dogmas even as they grew wary of certain devotional practices, a concern which Catholics have addressed in pastoral documents.

If we want a unified Christian response to the pressures now bearing on believers, we should seek to establish a shared foundation across as many aspects of the faith as we can. And it may be that, as has happened before in the history of sacred art, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox, and those fewer Protestant communities that retain the use of sacred art in their worship, such as the Lutherans, the Anglicans, the Episcopalians, the more liturgical churches generally, will lead the way. Othat others will then build on what they do in the wider culture.

As I detail in my book The Way of Beauty, this was the historical pattern, for example, in the Baroque and the neo-Gothic revival, where renewal began in the worshipping community and spread outward from there.

Liturgy as the wellspring of culture

This points to the conclusion that Christian culture is, in fact, renewed. A Christian culture does not grow first in the academy, the gallery, or the public square and then work its way inward to the altar.

It grows the other way round. Liturgy is the wellspring. It is in the worship of God, and supremely in the Eucharist, that the love I have described is kindled and sustained, and it is from that worship that the impulse to make beautiful things, and to order a whole society toward beauty, flows out into the world.

This is why it is the liturgical churches that have historically driven the evangelization of culture, for they possess the wellspring that nourishes culture. Among the liturgical churches, those that elevate the role of sacred art within worship itself, that do not confine the image to private devotion and personal prayer but give it a place at the very center of their public worship, will tend to be the most fruitful, because in them the dynamic of beauty and love I have traced is most fully at work.

And among these, the Catholic Church, which possesses the fullness of truth and the fullness of the sacramental life, is uniquely placed to be the source of a renewed Christian culture. Not because Catholics are more talented or more devout than their neighbors and brothers in Christ, but because the Church holds, intact and unbroken, the whole chain of doctrine that makes the icon possible and the whole sacramental order that makes love grow.

The icons are coming alive again, as Harrington aptly discerned, is one message that emerges from When Mary Calls. Harrington clearly perceives that Clayton’s book about Mary is about much more than Catholic devotion. Margarita Mooney Clayton, who is my wife, also correctly directs our attention to liturgical forms of Marian devotion that are often overlooked, and suggests a broader cultural renewal can emerge through devotion to Mary.

Icons will draw their life from the liturgy, and it is from the liturgy—including art and music for the liturgy—that a broader Christian culture, if we are to truly see one in our time, will rise.

And if such a renewed Christian culture is to rise from the ashes of icon desecration, Mary will be crucial. For it is through Mary that we come to her Son, and through him to the beauty that a Christian culture exists to make visible.

In When Mary Calls, Margarita Mooney Clayton (who is, I should disclose, my wife) gathers seven personal accounts of encounters with the Mother of God, drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and secular lives, including her own perilous work among religious dissidents in her mother’s native Cuba.

She leads with these testimonies, hooking readers through the often unseen and untold drama of finding and deepening faith. Theology is not missing but rather embedded within the narrative of each story. In unique ways, each story emphasizes that the Christian faith is not about a dry grasp of dogma but about dogma in service of a deep personal relationship with Christ, with Mary, and with the saints, whose mission is to lead us to Him. The stories show Mary drawing seekers into deeper relationship with her son and into the living community of faith, which they need to journey from questioning to belief, where unique and extraordinary encounters with Mary are transformed into the sustained practices of a life of faith shared in community.

Mary Harrington is not, on the face of it, the sort of reader one would expect to be moved by a book of Marian testimony. She is an academic by formation, secular in background, a feminist who came to public attention, especially in Britain, where she comes from, through a critique of progressive feminism rather than through any religious commitment. Published in 2023, her book Feminism Against Progress argued that feminism has done little to help most women.

Five years ago, one suspects, the idea that she, or anyone in the world she occupied, would write a warm and deeply considered review of a book about the Virgin Mary would have seemed improbable to me. And yet here she is, not merely tolerating the subject but finding in it something culturally significant, even personally affecting.

Harrington has been sharing her journey with her followers, in which her critiques of progressivism and secularism are leading her not just to critique feminism but also to attend an Anglican church.

When a thoughtful female philosopher, one who, at least in the past, was resolutely secular, turns to a book on Marian devotion and finds those deeply personal encounters with Mary not embarrassing but compelling, one wonders whether something has shifted in the wider culture.

Harrington herself seems to sense this. The stories Margarita has gathered, Harrington observes, are not confined to Catholics. They include people who were once seekers, not people raised with faith, who are now Greek Orthodox believers, mainline Protestants, and Catholics, each of whom was drawn to Mary’s presence and, through it, to healing, transformation, or inspiration.

A young Protestant man was healed at a holy well in Ireland. Our Lady of Guadalupe speaks to a frightened pregnant woman and saves her life. Tammy Peterson, wife of Jordan Peterson, who had rejected Christianity as a teenager, makes her way through cancer in her 50s and begins praying again, eventually converting to Catholicism. These are not the testimonies of cradle Catholics confirming what they already believed. They are accounts of surprise.

The mother-shaped blind spot

Harrington reads When Mary Calls through the prism of a theme she has written and spoken about elsewhere: what she calls the cultural erasure of motherhood, the way the modern world quietly eliminated the maternal role and instincts from its understanding of what it means to be a woman.

The marginalization of Mary in the Anglophone world, she suggests in response to reading this book, was not incidental to the Reformation but close to its center. The purging of icons, relics, and pilgrimages, set in motion in England by Thomas Cromwell in 1538, meant, in practice, the radical setting aside of Marian theology in favor of something more verbal, less visual, less sensory and more abstract.

Harrington does not spell out the insight by which she connects the rejection of icons and devotional practices to the eventual decline in devotion to Mary herself and the theological truths bound up with her role in the Incarnation, but I think she is correct. A lack of appreciation for Mary, she suggests, led, in time, to the situation in which the visible, embodied, mother-centered spirituality of the medieval world gave way to something cooler and more cerebral, what one person profiled in the book called a “rational, disenchanted worldview” that had made its way into Christianity.

Was it a coincidence, Harrington wonders, that this spiritual marginalization of Mary was followed, albeit slowly over centuries, by the material and technological marginalization of women in the modern project? She draws on Ivan Illich, who argued that modernity had the displacement of women (at least women as women, not the same as men, and women as mothers) baked into its worldview.

One need not endorse every link in her argument to say that it is significant that a scholar formed by feminist philosophy is suggesting that the loss of Mary and the loss of the valuing of motherhood may be outward signs of the same error. An error, I would add, that only leads to misery for all if lived out. On this point, Harrington has won many followers precisely for admitting that the modern world never prepared her for the most incredible part of her life: becoming a mother. Motherhood changed her, setting her on a journey toward more than progressivism and feminism had given her.

What the Protestants forgot

Here I want to add something that Harrington’s account seems to invite, though she does not quite say it. We are accustomed to speaking of the Reformation as a rejection of Mary. But it may be closer to the truth to say that in many cases Protestantism forgot Mary rather than rejected her. Woven throughout When Mary Calls, and explained in the book’s appendix, is something I didn’t know: the Reformers themselves did not reject fundamental Marian doctrines such as the Virgin Birth or the Mother of God (Theotokos).

Rather, the apparent hostility to the Mother of God comes from questions about improper forms of devotion to Mary. Luther and Calvin were concerned about medieval devotional practices that had grown up around Mary, which they feared had displaced the honor due to Christ alone. Over time, this in turn led to the neglect of Mary herself.

The icons coming alive

Harrington’s title is well chosen. “The icons are coming alive again,” she wrote, and not because anyone has mounted a campaign to revive them, but because people who had no particular reason to look for Mary are finding, it seems, that she calls them by their name, she lets them know in their hearts, as she told Saint Juan Diego on Tepeyac Hill five centuries ago “I am your mother.”

Two chapters of When Mary Calls I would particularly commend to artists and to anyone who thinks about the making of beautiful things. The first, specifically referred to by Harrington, features the composer Sir James MacMillan, whose words about Mary as a model for creatives Margarita puts into dialogue with a Promethean model, where the artist is defiant and human-centered, in which the artist seizes the fire and turns away from God to assert his own sovereign making.

And there is the Marian model, drawn from the Annunciation, which MacMillan describes, in which the artist receives rather than seizes, saying fiat to an inspiration that comes from beyond himself and extending the incarnational moment into the work of his hands. This is not a sentimental contrast. As an artist myself, I find that MacMillan offers a genuine account of where creative work comes from. Drawing our attention to Mary’s cooperation with God as an inspiration for creatives, it reframes the whole question of artistic vocation in a way that a secular age, perhaps exhausted by its own self-assertion, may be more ready to hear than it was a generation ago.

The other chapter from When Mary Calls that I recommend for artists is the story of the conversion of my own icon-painting teacher, Aidan Hart, and his journey from a young seeker to a mature man of faith and master iconographer. He speaks of devotion to Mary not as a doctrine held at arm’s length but as something that has guided his personal journey, both as a Christian and as a maker of sacred images.

The icon painter does not invent his subject. He receives a tradition and submits to it, and in that submission finds, one might say, not constraint but greater freedom. There seems to be a direct line between the fiat of the Annunciation and the discipline of the practicing iconographer, and Hart’s own path, from a secular beginning through testing a monastic vocation to a life as married man a working artist, could in many ways be considered a living illustration, one might even say icon, of the very pattern MacMillan describes of openness to inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

The clever title of Harrington’s article refers as much to images of Mary as to Mary as an icon in the more modern sense of the word, a figure who has become emblematic of an idea or a movement, someone the culture recognizes and reaches for. That the two senses, the painted image and the cultural emblem, should converge on the same word is itself a small instance of what Margarita’s book on Mary is about. The icon on a chapel wall and the icon in the imagination of a secular readership may be nearer to one another than many are aware.

What it means to venerate again

Harrington closes by wondering what it might mean, culturally and spiritually, if people were once again to regain the desire and capacity for veneration — the willingness to kneel before a figure like Mary and ask for her help. She rightly describes Margarita Mooney Clayton’s book as a gentle, careful work of ecumenical restoration.

I am inclined to put the point more strongly. The capacity for veneration is part of what it means to be fully human. The widespread loss of this capacity to venerate Mary, outside the Catholic and Orthodox churches and perhaps some Protestant churches, has cost us dearly. To venerate the Mother of God is to acknowledge, at the deepest level, our need for a model of love and self-giving, and for Christ Himself as the ultimate source of all that is good. In her fiat, Mary herself recognized this truth: “Ecce ancilla Domini: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum” (“Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it done to me according to thy word”). As a pastor recently observed in a homily I heard, these may be the most important words ever spoken by any human being aside from those of Christ Himself.

That a secular feminist scholar can see Mary as an icon in the religious and cultural sense of the word, and write about it with such elegance and care, is astounding. When Mary Calls is a book for Catholics, certainly. But its deeper interest perhaps lies in the people it reaches who are not Catholic or Orthodox, but Protestants and seekers, who seem to be discovering that the figure their culture set aside was waiting for them all along.

The icons are indeed coming alive again. We would do well to pay attention to who is noticing.

When Mary Calls: Surprising Encounters With the Mother of God by Margarita Mooney Clayton is published by Odysseus Books

Below is a YouTube presentation by Margarita Mooney Clayton about her book, delivered at the Catholic Information Center in downtown Washington, DC.

David Clayton is Dean of the Faculty of Sacred Arts at www.Pontifex.University and Artist in Residence of www.ScalaFoundation.org

Using Line and Tone to Represent Form

When we look out of a window and take in a view, we distinguish one object from another through visual contrast in their shapes. A person standing in a beam of light against a dark background is clearly visible; the three-dimensional form of his face is legible because of the variations in light and shadow across its surface - a bulbous nose, sunken cheeks, the curve of the jaw, and so on.

An artist can represent this contrast in two ways. The first is to represent the boundary between a light shape and a dark shape as a line.

In this portrayal of a knight by the English monk Matthew Paris, from the 13th-century Westminster Psalter, we see a skilled use of line to depict form. Paris controls his line with enough assurance to give it a graceful, flowing quality - a beauty comparable to fine calligraphy. Notice also how he varies the width and darkness of his lines. He does this for two purposes: first, to direct the viewer’s eye toward the parts of the composition he considers most important, since a thicker, darker line draws attention more strongly; and second, to indicate the degree of contrast between an object and its background. Where a light shape sits against a much darker one, the contrast is high, and a bold line is appropriate; where a pale shape sits against a slightly darker background, the contrast is low, and only a thin, pale line is used. Where there is effectively no contrast at all, the skilled artist will allow the line to disappear entirely, even though he knows the edge of an object is there. The less skilled artist tends to put the line in anyway, because he knows intellectually that the edge exists, and this will overrule what his eyes are actually telling him. Line drawing is easy to do poorly - it is how most children begin - but demands genuine subtlety to handle well.

Where line represents contrast by marking a boundary, the second approach represents it by painting tonal values directly, as the eye sees them. This is harder than it sounds. Most people must be trained to observe what the eye actually sees rather than what the mind constructs after processing visual information - and what the mind constructs is always conditioned by memory and prior knowledge of the object. Consider this self-portrait by Rembrandt:

Here, there are no lines at all. Everything is a tonal value, and any apparent edge is simply the junction of a lighter and a darker area. This allows Rembrandt to convey the shape of the face without an outline. He is also willing to let edges dissolve where the tonal contrast is low - the right side of the figure here is barely distinguishable from the background. This points to a deeper distinction between the two approaches. Line tends to show edges and discontinuities; tonal painting can express the gradually changing internal variations of a three-dimensional surface, which is why it lends itself more to high naturalism.

In practice, most artists combine the two approaches, with one playing a supporting role to the other. Matthew Paris is a good example: predominantly linear, but with enough internal tonal variation to suggest the three-dimensional character of the forms. Having considered line and tone, we can turn to the third element - color - which brings its own particular difficulties.

Color

Color can also be used to describe form, but it is the most difficult of the three elements to handle well, for reasons that are easy to overlook.

Consider a grayscale image of something colored in nature. Red and yellow can generally be distinguished, since red tends toward a darker tonal value in monochrome, but red and blue are much harder to tell apart. I can remember watching Liverpool and Everton soccer matches on a black-and-white television in the 1960s: Liverpool in deep red, Everton in deep blue - indistinguishable from the waist up. Fortunately, Everton wore white shorts and Liverpool red, which settled the question. (I am a Liverpool supporter, incidentally.)

The reason this matters to the painter lies in how the eye works. The human eye reads both monochrome and color simultaneously, using different receptor cells - rods and cones - in the retina, and the brain can assess three-dimensional form from tonal and color variation in combination. But while the mind processes this information with ease, it is extremely difficult for the artist to represent it faithfully. Colors do not simply become darker or lighter in shadow - they may shift toward blue in shade, or toward yellow and green in bright sunlight, even though the actual color of the object has not changed. This means that to paint color accurately, the artist must observe what his eye receives rather than what his intellect tells him the color ought to be.

There is a further complication: colors shift not only with light and shadow but also with distance, through what is called color perspective. The green of leaves becomes progressively bluer the further away they are, which is why mountain ranges always appear blue on the horizon - hence the song about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Tonal contrast also decreases with distance, so that those blue mountains become not only bluer but lighter the further away they are. The skilled naturalistic artist must hold all of these variables in balance simultaneously, and few manage to do so well.

Here is one who did:

In Vermeer’s The Art of Painting (c. 1666), notice the large draped curtain pulled to one side. We judge the actual color of its pattern by looking at the mid-tones - the areas neither bleached by direct light nor lost in deep shadow. Vermeer has shifted the colors so that what is blue in full light becomes reddish in the shadow, and vice versa; yet the eye reads the fabric as a consistently colored pattern, because the brain instinctively compensates for exactly this kind of variation. To do this in paint, Vermeer had to observe the colors as his eye received them rather than as his intellect classified them - suppressing the very interpretive process by which we normally make sense of what we see. This capacity is rare. Most Baroque masters simplified the problem by concentrating on tonal variation and applying Vermeer’s kind of color sensitivity only at the main focal points.

Closely related to the handling of color and tone is the question of how the artist represents distance itself - not just the color shift of distant objects, but the whole problem of conveying size and space on a flat surface.

Judging Distance and Size

If we see a figure in a painting, we may estimate his height by comparing him to familiar objects nearby - a door, a table, another figure. But we also judge distance by the resolution of detail: when something is far away, we cannot distinguish its finer features as clearly as when it is close. A good artist knows this and uses it. One of the most common errors of beginners is to paint distant objects with as much detail as near ones - every leaf on a distant tree painstakingly rendered. This creates an image that is somehow mentally exhausting, overloaded with information the eye would never actually receive at that distance. Both the Pre-Raphaelites and the modern photorealists can be guilty of this, and in different ways the results share a quality of incongruity: the painting is the product of technical accomplishment, but somehow we sense, even if we do not know why, that something is visually wrong.

Yet this same principle, once understood, can be turned to deliberate and powerful effect. Artists who consciously heighten detail at apparent distances and, in doing so, deliberately override natural perception can imbue their images with a symbolic or heavenly quality. In heaven, to behold something fully is to know it fully; heightened detail across an entire picture plane suggests a mode of seeing that is not bound by natural distance. Gothic painters such as Duccio and iconographic painters such as Andrei Rublev understood this and used it consistently. Their images carry a sense of participation in a different order of reality - one where the ordinary limits of perception do not apply. There is a skill in using this as a visual tool: for the break from naturalism to work, everything else present in the painting must support the idea that we are looking at heaven, so that the heightened level of detail no longer strikes the viewer as incongruous.

Putting It All Together

The artist composes his picture as a whole by weighing and combining these elements - line, tone, color, detail - in different proportions and with different emphases. The resulting balance between naturalism and abstraction, between depicting the visible world as it appears and representing realities that transcend it, characterizes the style of a given work and the tradition to which it belongs.

It is commonly said that a good artist knows the rules, and a great artist knows when to break them. I do not think this is quite right. These are not arbitrary rules but principles grounded in how images actually work, and the genuinely skilled artist does not break them - he applies them differently depending on what he is trying to represent. The same principle of detail and distance is applied one way when painting the natural world, where detail diminishes with distance, and another way when painting heavenly subjects, where it does not. What looks like rule-breaking is usually the consistent application of a different set of governing assumptions about the nature of the subject. The failure of the Pre-Raphaelites and photorealists is not that they broke the rules but that they applied naturalistic conventions to subject matter and compositions that would have been better served by something else, producing an incongruity they did not recognize and could not resolve.

Perhaps a distinction in motivation should be made here between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Photorealists. The Pre-Raphaelites were generally Christian in motivation and sought to reestablish the late-Gothic style of artists such as Van Eyck, who preceded the Italian Renaissance exemplified by Raphael. This is was part of the broad Victorian neo-Gothic movement that was connected with Anglican and Catholic Christianity in England in the 19th century. What was a very successful movement architecturally was, in my opinion, less successful artistically for the reason I gave above. However, even with this handicap, many examples of their art can still be striking and beautiful and are redeemed in my eyes because the symbolism and choice of subject are handled well and are otherwise in harmony with a Christian worldview. Certainly, it is preferable to much contemporary art!

The Photorealists, however, are materialists who deliberately pack their images with detail in order to reflect their false assertion, from a Christian point of view, that what they represent has no meaning or significance, and they reject the idea that a man is anything more significant than a collection of atoms that we happen to call a man. For them, the collection of atoms we call a man has no more significance than the collection of atoms we recognize as a cigarette butt on the floor.

This framework - line, tone, color, medium, and the handling of detail and distance - is the vocabulary that all visual artists share. The three great traditions I will be exploring in subsequent posts, the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque, each represent a coherent and internally consistent way of deploying that vocabulary. An artist working within one of those traditions handles the elements in broadly the ways characteristic of that tradition, and this is what makes the tradition recognizable. At the same time, the greatest artists within a tradition are recognizable as individuals: Velázquez, for instance, is unmistakably a Baroque painter, yet equally unmistakably himself. Some elements of his handling - his way with tone, his restraint with line, his management of color perspective - are shared with other Baroque painters; others are distinctively his own. Understanding the vocabulary makes it possible to see both things at once.